Enjoy wearing out your rotor and heating up the shack with your tuner.
i work plenty off the back and don't own a tuner. the advantages of an expensive antenna with moving parts in the sky is a hard sell for a free antenna that works just fine.
i work plenty off the back and don't own a tuner. the advantages of an expensive antenna with moving parts in the sky is a hard sell for a free antenna that works just fine.
The advantage of the SteppIR is not that you don't need a tuner (which is nice as I hate using tuners), it's that you get ONE antenna that covers all bands with near monoband performance. My single 4 ele beam covers *all* frequencies between 10 and 20 meters, not just the ham bands. Plus, you can't have good gain in one direction without sacrificing gain in the other - it's called front to back ratio. If you think you can work 'em off the back of your beam, you've never tried using the 180 degree feature. That *REALLY* rocks near sunset here when the JAs are coming in and with the flip of a switch, I can work South America to get another multiplier before going back to the JAs. I really never thought that would amount to much, until I tried it! Really cool!
By far the overall best antenna one can buy, hands down.
ex-W4DFW Ham since 1970. ARRL Life Member and Volunteer Counsel
The problem I have with the Steppir series is that while the element lengths change, the SPACING between the elements do NOT! So they are not optimized for maximum gain that you can get in a well designed MULTIBAND antenna. I need MAXIMUM GAIN!!! I don't care if I hafta use a Tuner.
The problem I have with the Steppir series is that while the element lengths change, the SPACING between the elements do NOT! So they are not optimized for maximum gain that you can get in a well designed MULTIBAND antenna. I need MAXIMUM GAIN!!! I don't care if I hafta use a Tuner.
Try one. Trust me.
ex-W4DFW Ham since 1970. ARRL Life Member and Volunteer Counsel
The problem I have with the Steppir series is that while the element lengths change, the SPACING between the elements do NOT! So they are not optimized for maximum gain that you can get in a well designed MULTIBAND antenna. I need MAXIMUM GAIN!!! I don't care if I hafta use a Tuner.
So... a multiband antenna with lossy traps and the same fixed element spacing issue is better?
btw, fixed spacing is not really an issue. The only thing you really lose is bandwidth and with movable elements that's not a problem.
Originally Posted by N2RJ
