The difference in gain from being outside compared to being indoors would outweigh the height differential. A couple of feet difference in height isn't going to be noticeable.

What is the guttering of your house made of? If it is metal then get a gutter mount for the antenna and clamp it to that. Personally I'd be inclined to get it on the roof or on the top of the gable end on a small bracket.

I'm sure the SGC230 manual even shows using gutters as one of the options for stealth antennas.

Really it doesn't.  You're building a 1/3 wave groundplane antenna.

How is that any different to a quarter wave groundplane antenna which has a feedpoint impedance partially dependent on the angle of the radials?

I can tell you that sat here. It is where the repeater antenna is masked from your antenna by the terrain around you. Firing a signal more horizontally will not overcome this. And when you're in the same valley as the repeater is on the mountain top several hundred feet above, firing out a signal horizontally is worse than one with a more vertical take off.

You will because you have clear line of sight. At that point then an antenna with a more horizontal take off angle is beneficial.

I struggle to get wifi throughout my house yet I can put the router outside and get good signal strength accessing it with my mobile phone from several hundred feet away.


Absolutely but I suggest you re-read your course study material about how VHF works. It may save you a lot of head scratching wondering why you've a notable improvement at high elevations but a degradation at lower ones.

If the antenna is a half wavelength or longer, it will have little dependence on the car body.

Considering you are trying to get more gain with FM repeaters I'm not sure how you would benefit from a OCF Dipole. Also you don't use a OCF with radials - I'm a bit confused as to what you think they'd achieve.

Also as you don't want horizontal take off to be the max gain due to the fact the repeater antennas are higher than you, you could actually find a quarter wave antenna would work better than a 5/8 wave or longer depending on the height differential.

As far as the XYL is concerned whenever I buy anything its £14.99. 

Forget 80m...all you'll do is prove QRP works.

My choices would be Scorpion and then Tarheel. High Sierra AFAIK are no longer making them.

I have a Little Tarheel II which works fine for me with a 72" whip. Its not the most efficient but it gets out OK and because I can get it on the roof of my car probably works better than a large screwdriver poorly installed on a tow hitch.

With them using a 3/8 mount, if you do a proper job of the installation with the bonding etc etc then upgrading to such as the Little Tarheel II or 75 is simply a matter of screwing it to where the Hamstick sat and running the motor control leads.

If you have a space 8ft x 8ft take a look at the G3TPW Cobwebb. 20-10m fullsize dipoles in a 8ft square.

Steve G3TXQ redesigned it to make it easier to build homebrew.

http://www.karinya.net/g3txq/cobweb/

Something is broken if you've not heard European stations on 20m during the day/early evening.

I use a SGC230 with 75ft of wire and that'll tune on 160m.

The DX Engineering item seems to be DX Engineering bundling a bunch of stuff together to form a kit for those too lazy to get the bits together themselves and for which DX Engineering charge a premium.

Not true dual receive. The primary side takes over the audio. Selector control has been shown to be intermittent. Depreciation will be a killer.

For £60 more in the UK you can buy a Kenwood TM-V71E which is infinitely better.

My take of the TS990 is it is effectively a SDR with knobs and buttons. It will have the advantages of a SDR - panadapter, excellent brick wall filtering, the ability to sample a large bandwidth etc but you won't need a PC or get RSI from using the mouse to alter the RF gain. 

My VHF/UHF transceiver - a TM-D710 is installed about as good as it is possible to do. Antenna mounted by hole drilled in the middle of the roof, wiring to battery with 50A rated cable, all panels bonded. No problem hitting a repeater 60 miles away over a range of hills.

It will desense the FM radio in the car when I transmit. It is more to do with the poor filtering of the FM radio than the 710 installation.

Manufacturer car radios are built down to a price. You would probably find a decent one such as a Clarion would not suffer as much.

At the end of the day though if you've got an antenna with a radio transmitting 10W, 25W, 50W on VHF a few feet away from another one for the FM radio you are going to get desense unless you start using bandpass filters or using a stub to notch the 2m frequencies.

Of course there would be a big difference. I can't believe you actually would expect to see something different.

The IMD is due to using 12V finals both to allow a TRX to be used mobile and cost cutting, neither of which will be the case with the TS990. As it is mains powered with no 12V DC socket I doubt very much they will use 12V finals.

Maybe you should learn how to use your radio.