CDX 007,
Good questions.
Both antennas are about the same height to the base, Both roughly 48 foot towers, both on a mast pipe 4 to 5 feet above the top of the tower.
Which should give the Sigma a height advantage to the tip as it is longer in dimension.
The QTH of both antennas in a due South direction are 3 miles apart as the crow flies.
I was basically due East of both antennas.
Once again this was not a controlled comparision done in a test type environment, just a real world comparision.
I QSO'ed with both stations on the drive to an old military base, long ago taken over by the Port authority, I went to the airstrip side so there would be no obstacles around for many hundreds of yards, in the clear as much as possible.
I did not roll the mobile back or forth, just parked the mobile, shut the engine off and did the comparision.
It was not a shoot out, it was one at a time, looking at S meter readings in a stationary setting.
The result was the 5/8 had a stronger signal on the meter, audio was not compared as two different transcievers was used.
The test was done in LSB mode of operation not AM, everyone was on freq lined up with the FT-900 on the Sigma IV.
Both feed points of the antennas should have been around a wavelength and a half in the air vertically on 11 meters, so angle of radiation should be close to 20 degrees.
If indeed the sigma has a lower angle of radiation than the 5/8 that could be a valid reason that the signal was less at 26 miles away. The sigma may have a better signal at 40 or 50 miles out, if I can make it back in the mobile, if not cell phones are great. May have to try that test next.
It will be interesting to compare both antennas when the DX opens to see how both perform, I know how the 5/8 perform as I have one at 55 feet to the feed point also, but will look forward to see how the sigma performs when the window opens again.
Of course neither one compare to the beam at two wavelengths in height.
If I get a chance to due further comparisions I will post results.
