Hello Eddie, great to hear from you again and I welcome you to the forum.
To Eddie and King in particular. I do not have a Wolf .64 or you would have heard much buzz from me already. I do have one of Jays I-10K’s and it is a great antenna, but I have issues with it. I also have one of Eddie's no ground plane 1/2 wave verticals I think it is called the .50-11M vertical. It is basically a Ringo styled product and has a very small foot print in the air, as does the A99. It looks like a Maco V58 without ground plane.
Believe me it is very well constructed, and as I said, Eddie uses only the best parts in his kits. Problem with this one is that it is unpredictable as to tune at one height and then moving to another. If you could tune it at installed height this might be overcome. Understand what I mean here. I can tune it at 13' above earth and get what most would consider a reasonable tune (low SWR and showing good results on an analyzer). However on raising it, the tune goes away and the SWR changes, typically drops in frequency. This probably has to do with how the antenna is able to produce the counterpoise it needs and how the reactance changes with presence to the earth. With that said, I will tell you that I would never consider a 1.7 – 2.0 SWR to be bad and when I did tune at 13’ and raised it higher to about 20’+ it worked very well, but with a higher SWR. I even had local signal reports with it that surpassed my I-10K at times, which was installed at about 45’ to the base. It is just made a very strong signal in some directions or to some stations, not all stations, but some around the area. It was just my feeling that the 50-11M would not be acceptable to most CB operators if the same tuning results happened in their installation.
I would love to have one of his .64 antennas and compare it with my I-10K, but at the time, the 50-11M was what I was looking for to replace my A99 in a pine tree plus when I got around to it Eddie was not producing his verticals either.
I am a firm believer that the design features Wolf uses in his .64 are superior to all others in a theoretical since for this category of antenna. That is not to say that it will or won’t show a bigger signal in ever case over all others, it is just when everything is considered about the design it really looks good and his prices are fair.
Now there is an issue raised in this thread about feeder losses. I cannot state that one is better or worse than another, but in the use/case of the antennas we are referring to here, I doubt there is a viable difference. Over the years I have worked most of them including the old ones and basically I like them all. The one big thing I look for in an antenna is the receive nature of the element, so for me the f-glass antennas take a back seat to all the rest mentioned here.
Your last statement is where I'm coming from too. Great work Eddie, my hat's off to you.
Its great to see your participation here. I'm sure your contributions to the different topic areas of the forum will be very informative. :idea: 