N5IT, I agree such losses do have an effect.
I just recently posted a new thread about an idea on CMC's and antenna height (feed line length) in the antenna section.
Thanks for the nice comments Wild Fire.
IMO the A/P was always unappreciated and I felt it was mainly from guys that probably never owned one, and though it only worked well when it was mounted low to the Earth...copying comments they had overheard.
Now it looks like a little of the same is probably true about the New Top One, but this time we just don't hear many comments, like no body was buying it, and maybe that was because it was too short or due to the bad publicity about the AstroPlane.
Personally, I was amazed with the results when I first installed my NTO. When I got it, I was a little confused with the instructions not having many dimensions, but when I put it together I realized it was like plug and play.
I was also impressed with the match right of of the box. The first time I built it...it showed me an almost perfect SWR match, and a very large bandwidth right where I set it from the frequency instructions.
