I have been listening to my scanner here at home just about everynight I tinker in the garage. I pick up quite a bit traffic too as the Phoenix Main, gets busy at night. I have a small antenna with 12’ cord that is ment to mount to a vehicle roof. At the moment, much to my wife amusement, i have the cord squeezed out the garage door and balanceing on the roof on a couple of 2x4’s. I just pray the cat’s dont play with it.
I would like to get something more powerful and or atleast a better set up than this. Is there any good system to do for a home install and maybe get more than a 12’ foot lead so I can have more options to have it in the house? Maybe a 20’ lead would be great.
Ideally then I can unplug it and put in the truck when I go out hunting and have the current antenna, set up for vehicle use.
Its an older Bearcat by Uniden I think. Any suggestions, thoughts or advice, greatly appreicated.
Lot’s of options on-line, and you can easily go 50-100’ with coax.
Check for local radio shops - they may have something useful for you. If all you are listening to is railroad, you can settle for a VHF-High antenna - otherwise you may want to look for a multi-band antenna. (Phoenix Fire was still running on VHF-Hi last I knew - don’t know about the Police…)
Failing a radio shop, stop by your local Radio Shack. They still have some antennas and definitely have coax - already terminated on both ends if you aren’t handy with doing that yourself. You might have to pick up an adapter for your radio, too.
Once you’ve got your antenna, you’ve got to get it mounted. Once again, wherever you get the antenna should also have some mounting options. Altitude is important - the higher you get the antenna, the more you’ll pick up. Consider local conditions, though, as you can stick an antenna pretty high in calm winds, but it won’t last long with a stiff breeze or worse. Guy wires would become important, or a pretty secure tripod base.
Consider where you will mount the antenna before you buy the coax, too. It wouldn’t be pleasant to get 50’ only to discover you need 100’ - and after you run it hither and yon to get from the antenna to where you plan to have your scanner, the distance can add up.
There is a trade-off between the gain achieved by elevating the antenna ever higher and the cost to do so. You have to decide what that is.
Make sure you don’t run afoul of any building codes, etc…
If it is a mag mount type antenna, you would benefit from a better ground plane, also.
For garage operation, you might consider a Discone type antenna. Radio Shack used to sell one, with a Coax already attached. If you must have over 50’ of antenna, consider a larger diamater coax, such as RG8. (Instead of RG58, the smaller stuff…) At the 160mhz AAR freq, 100 ft of RG58 will exhibit much more loss than RG8. Other good sources are Ham Radio Outlet (HRO)(if you check the link, check the bottom right of page 41) or Amateur Electronics Supply (AES). The Discone antenna is pretty broad band, so you would get decent coverage all over the scanner bands. It looks like the Diamond antenna already has an “N” type connector. Most scanners use a BNC type connector. You can get an adapter to easily connect the antenna to the scanner…just tell the helpful person on the phone what you want to do with it…
If you are using a mag mount, you need a metal surface to place it on…a simple whip antenna on a mag mount needs a large metal surface ( ideally, the radius of this plate would be 10% greater than the length of the whip- but any amount is better than none). I have known some folks to get acceptable performance by making a large X out of metallic tape directly underneath the whip/mag mount.
If you are a do-it-yourself kind of guy, and can solder copper pipe, a J-pole can be built fairly cheaply…and it is a grounded antenna, doesnt need a ground plane and provides grounding from lightening strikes…here are lots of links about building J-poles. A j-pole built for the 146Mhz ham band might give decent performance, but one b
Thanks guys for all the links and tips. I am goign to look into it. Last night I finally had the chance to go an catch a train. Heard the dispatcher give out of the track warrant with start and stop mileage.
Thanks to map work and some major help with “mileage knowledge” from Silicon12, I did some quick off the hip math in my head and headed out and caught the train with 10 minutes to spare. Very, very cool indeed.