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Show all reviews of the Austin Ferret Base Scanner Antenna
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of the Austin Ferret Base Scanner Antenna.
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KI6DYR
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Rating: 3/5
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Nov 21, 2009 15:28
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Just OKAY
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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I operate a professional scanner monitoring service and have used nearly every antenna out there. From my mountaintop location at 6,400 feet overlooking all of southern California the Ferret does not perform any better than a discone.
I feed 12 scanners or commercial receivers to the internet from just this location and many more from 8 other locations in our group. Because of scanner frontend overload I deliberately insert 20dB or more of attenuation to knock down the intermod, so the tests are equal. Even without any attenuation for testing the performance using an A/B switch test method shows no difference to a discone.
The Ferret is currently at our central Los Angeles, California remote location (all scanners are remote controlled,) the Ferret performs sub-par on 30-50MHz. CHP still uses lowband and the Ferret's electrical length cannot match a full size 1/2 wave coaxial antenna (http://scannerbuff.net/lowband/) tuned for 40MHz. Apples and oranges? Yes. Although the antenna is unity gain one should expect a tuned 1/2 wave to do better than this.
More importantly, trying to reach Austin is an exercise in futility. They do not answer the telephone; they do not reply to emails. They do not reply to FAXes.
Currently selling for $299 plus large box UPS shipping I feel that this antenna is not worth the price. The only saving face is that as a tuned antenna it tends to knock down out-of-band signals.
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Product is in production.
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