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Reviews For: Comet 4 Ele. 6M Beam.

Category: Antennas: VHF/UHF+ Directional (Yagi, quad, etc.)

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Review Summary For : Comet 4 Ele. 6M Beam.
Reviews: 12MSRP: 129.95
Description:
Wide Band 6 Meter Beam
Product is in production
More Info: http://micks@cometantenna.com
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
00123.9
K0XXX Rating: 2001-08-28
Wide Banded & Easy Construction Time Owned: 3 to 6 months.
The antenna has no written instructions (only pictures) however, construction was easy and straight forward.

Using a MFJ analyzer to check it, the VSWR was nearly flat across the entire band. It started increasing at about 53.7MHz but still did not get higher than 1.7.

The only complaint I have is that one of the holes for mounting the elements to the boom was not aligned with the others. But, it was close enough that about 15 seconds with the Dremel tool fixed the problem.

Overall, I am very satisfied with the antenna and may purchase a second one for stacking (which may require a modification to the mounting hardware).
W6CQA Rating: 2000-12-04
A very wide band ant. Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Wanting a light weight ant. for 6 meters, I thought I would give the Comet model CA-52HB4 a try. It has a 10.5 ft. boom and is very light, at 4lb./14oz. It is rated at 10.4 dbi and a front /back ratio of over 19 db. That's not a great front/back but the antenna does cover the entire band. The parts were well packed and even the element tubing pieces were packed inside a plastic bag. All parts were there and there were no extras. The elements are made up of three pieces. The centers of the elements are 7/16' tubing and the outer sections are 3/8". Element sections are held together with small stainless steel bolts, though the drawing and parts list indicates they are "self tapping". The boom is made of 1" od. aluminum tubing and held together with a two piece hot dipped steel coupler. Don't know why they didn't use a piece of aluminum tubing for a coupling sleeve? All other hardware is stainless steel, including the boom to mast bracket, which incidentlly, covers mast sizes of 1" to 2&1/2". The antennas wide band characteristics are obtained from the unusual dual driven elements. What is unusual, is the dual gamma matching system. The driven elements are connected via a two conductor phase line(unshielded). You must pay careful attention when assembling the gamma arms and the connection of the phase line. The gamma arms are not tapped at the same positions and the phase line must be connected so the driven elements are in proper phase. There are no step by step instructions. You must follow the drawings. The parts assembled properly and everything was very clean. The element mounting bolts and mast clamp is provided with wing nuts for easy assembly for portable operation. About the time I was thinking, "here is another fine Japanese product", my bubble popped. The boom to element mounting saddles were not formed properly. Instead of providing an element mounted at right angles to the boom,(90 degrees), they were more like 80 degress. They were all off by the same amount and in the same direction. I was able to chuck up a rotory file in my drill press and grind enough material, (aluminum), out, to make them work. There are no provisions for vertical mounting for local FM activity. The mast to boom mounting "U" bolt passes through the pre-drilled holes in the boom. It could be stacked side by side with another CA-52HB4 for vertcal polarization, although a single horizontal antenna would work fine on FM "skip" signals.The factory provides a radiation pattern graph and a SWR graph. My antenna is in a fixed position, so couldn't check the pattern, however the SWR graph was very close to the factory graph, with the highest SWR of 1.7 at 54mhz and dropping to a perfect 1:1 at 51mhz. I would have given the antenna an easy "5" had it not been for the manufacturing goof on the element brackets.