HT with a roof antenna

[N1BNC]

Many years ago I did just this. I had 11 elements up at 40' with a rotor on a chimney and reasonable coax and it worked amazingly well. I was using an IC2a from Icom and had no trouble working area repeaters that I could not access from the second floor. I used good coax up to the wall and then much lighter stuff as to not stress the antenna connector at the top of the radio. I later bought a mobile unit to use instead of the walkie in this fashion and the additional power helped even more.

[W8JX]

I once made a 2m dipole out of some clip on TV rabbit ears. I adjusted them to length and feed it directly with coax. It is still up in attic here as a backup antenna.

[ONAIR]

I once made a 2m dipole out of some clip on TV rabbit ears. I adjusted them to length and feed it directly with coax. It is still up in attic here as a backup antenna.

    Those rabbit ears can come in real handy.  I built a dipole with them for 2 Meters, then realized that by just pushing the elements in and out, they would also work on 6 Meters and 440! 

[K1CJS]

The sensitivity of the receivers on some HTs will prove to be a problem with a good antenna, but you'll never know until you try it.  Keep in mind that most good HTs have good filtering and limiting circuitry in them to prevent just that kind of thing.  That is one of the reasons why some HTs are more expensive than others.  They have better, tighter receivers.

[KQ6Q]

You can run an HT to an outdoor antenna with excellent results. LMR-400 is not necessary - but the better the coax, the better the results. RG-58 absolutely not recommended. Cable TV RG6 works fine also, as other mentioned. I have a Radio Shack Discone about 10' above the roof, fed with about 50' of foam RG-8. Works pretty well, even up to 1.2 Ghz. on 1.2, I use my Icom T81A, which puts out 1 watt on that freq. I use it with the discone during VHF/UHF contests, and make some simplex FM contacts up there on 440 and 1.2 - not many, but some! for 6m and 2m, there's 100W from my 746Pro and beams for each band... big difference! I use the discone on 2m now and then, when I don't want to swing the beam -

[K1CJS]

RG6 may seem to work fine, but remember that when using that type cable, the impedance mismatches don't affect higher wattage radios too much--but with a low wattage handheld, you may not get as good a signal out while transmitting because of mismatch loss.  For handheld use, a 50 ohm cable is definitely recommended.  Also, terminating RG6 with a BNC connector (or the type connector on your handheld) is not going to do the antenna connector on your handheld much good since RG6 doesn't flex like conventional RG58--or even RG8X--does.