Revisiting Antenna Amplifiers and placement.

[James Sentman]

Scanner antennas generally have a wide range of active frequency reception and the one from Radio Shack that i linked to all those years ago had the 310 mhz well within it’s range. For an amp you need one that will amplify that range as well. Most that provide both TV and FM  will, but not every one I tried actually did anything. Some stopped it working all together by just amping up the noise more so than the signal. That inline one from radio shack worked the best for me.

I’ve extended the antennas with just a longer run of coax, and that seems to work fine too, but it’s often simpler to use the wiznet card as you probably already have some ethernet to other places in the house.

I currently have 2 W800’s in the house. One is the scanner antenna towards one side of the house and the other is just the proper length of wire antenna run off a long coax line to the other side of the house. both have one of those radio shack inline antenna amps on them and between the 2 of them I can pick up anything anywhere in the house and out to the mailbox. There are calculators online for figuring out the best length of wire to use for a specific frequency. Since we’re not wanting to pick up a wide range really but just the one specific one it’s quite easy to make a fairly decent one with just that. A quarter wavelength 310mhz antenna should be just a hair over 9 inches long, 9.058” is close enough ;) You could go to a half wavelength one at 18.11” but I’ve never tried that so i don’t know if it would be better or worse than the quarter wavelength.

> On Jan 31, 2018, at 8:37 AM,  Jerry — MacSolutions <jerry at stlmacguy.com> wrote:
> 
> Is there a specification for the amp that makes one better than another?  
> What gain is acceptable without amplifying noise?  
> Does it matter if an antenna is designed to get more frequencies than X-10 or does the W800 only “listen” to 310MHz and ignores others?  
> Will a taller antenna like one designed for a scanner help?  
> I know the length of the antenna is tuned to a frequency but perhaps a longer one might help with gain?
> 
> So many questions as usual…

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.machomeautomation.com/pipermail/xtensionlist/attachments/20180131/2c1f33bc/attachment.html>