My antenna is approximately 30 feet AGL with a total run of 65 feet of RG-6 coax (quad-shield with a solid-copper center conductor). (BTW the MON731 was discontinued back in October 2005: ) Your choice of a ground plane kit with an N connector is definitely better than an SO-239/PL-259 termination especially for the higher 800-900 MHz frequencies. I have a similar setup on my roof with an Antenna Specialists MON731 scanner antenna which is essentially a ground plane kit with an N connector mated with an Antenna Specialists all-band MON series NMO antenna. However, it's still fun and worthwhile to stick an antenna up on a pole and give it a try. Being able to visualize paths on Google Earth can help quite a bit. I've be using it at work to proof out a proposal to do a multi hop microwave link to one of our (very) remote sites. Google Earth can be a useful tool for this sort of stuff. Then you could figure in your feed line losses and you'd get a pretty good idea if there would be a usable signal at your radio.īut, by the time you do all that math, you could probably stick the antenna up there and figure out the same thing. That could tell you (roughly) how strong the signal would be reaching your antenna. If you knew the ERP (transmitter power - feed line losses x antenna gain), sometimes on the FCC license, you could figure out how much signal was leaving the site. You can go a bit further, using the distance, you can figure "free space losses" to figure out how much signal will be lost between the transmitting antenna and your antenna. Even if the path is obstructed, it might work as reflection off hills, buildings, etc can bring the signal in from other directions. That'll show you if there is an unobstructed path. Use the "absolute" setting under altitude. Knowing the location of the transmitter (it's on the FCC license) you want to listen to and your location, put those in Google Earth and use the "ruler" function to draw out the path. With the right info, it could be figured out before doing any install, but that's a lot to do via chat boards.
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