Despite warnings to the contrary, I was tempted to buy a couple of monoband whips and a centre piece to make up a (very) short "dipole". I had already been persuaded of the usefulness of short base-loaded whips in using my Walkabout antenna and so - given that they aren't exactly expensive - I got a brace of 30m antennas.
I've been wanting a permanent antenna solution for the multi-mode 30m beacon (being frustrated by giving over the station g5rv to beacon duties). Although I haven't yet finished my experiments with loops, I decided to give the whips a try...
I used to have a 2m colinear mounted on the end of my garage, but I wasn't getting much value out of it (I only occasionally fire out an APRS signal on VHF and I can't match the erudition of those using the CB proxy which 2m NBFM seems to amount to). So - I pulled down the colinear and put up my new "runt" dipole in its place.
I left the beacon running overnight with the usual 50mW output and here's the performance, plotted as spot count in each contiguous 10-minute interval, (shown in red) against the "average" performance experienced over recent weeks (in blue)...

The g5rv runs pretty much N-S, whereas the new "runt" dipole runs NW-SE. This seems to have given me slightly better projection into Scandinavia than I was achieving with the g5rv (actually, I was getting signals up into arctic Norway when the g5rv's centre connections were faulty - obviously this was result of the inevitable disruption to the radiation pattern, accompanying the observed disruption to the load presented to the transmitter)...

Clearly, I need to collect more data before jumping to any conclusions but - for now at least - I am enjoying the luxury of a dedicated 30m antenna for the beacon, leaving my main antenna free for whatever else takes my fancy !
...-.- de m0xpd
That's impressive by any standards. I wonder how it would fare as a dedicated antenna for 30m APRS?
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