yb2normal Senior Heliman Location: Broomfield, CO
| MPA,
Generally speaking, higher gain antennas achieve their gain at the expense of a 'tighter' radiation pattern. Your poor results with the 5dbi antenna might be attributed to that, since that antenna will have more null spots than the smaller, lower gain antenna.
Gaucho, I know of some guys in Floriday who used a 15dbi collinear antenna and one of my 1 watt 2.4ghz transmitter to fly over 5 miles away. Keep in mind however that this gain comes at a price as I mention above... They were flying fairly low during this test. The higher the gain of your collinear antenna, the more squashed the signal coverage pattern will be (a donut around the antenna). This is not a problem for point to point communications on the ground, since the antennas are sitting firmly in the coverage area of each other, but could cause problems in aerial applications where you find yourself flying high over yourself versus ranging far out in the horizontal.
Regards,
Bill |