Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week I climbed on my roof and installed a base antenna for the 2m and 70cm band. The antenna is a Diamond X-300N. It's 3 meters tall, has a gain of 6.5 dB on 2m and 9 dB on 70cm. I've owned it for just under eight years and this week I finally took it out of the box and installed it. I know, I know, in my defence, you shouldn't rush these things. Truth is, until this week I really didn't have a realistic way of installing it. Several factors needed to come together. Some of them trivial, others less so. In the end, the antenna is now installed on my roof, connected via coax through my roof to my radio. Now before we get all excited about what that means, let's compare my previous outdoor setting to the current one. Today I'm using LMR-400 coax, 30 meters of it. Previously I used RG-58, but only 20 meters of it. From a coax perspective, even though I increased the length by 30%, my loss actually went down, on 70cm it went down by over 4 dB. If you recall, 3 dB loss