i understand the difficulties in getting good signal reports especially as the conditions are unstable with the sun waking up, even with our normally stable fm signals we get fluctuations from time to time, something as simple as an airplane flying over causes my buddy at the other side of the hills signal to wave about as much as much as plus 2 s-units and down to zero, when the plane passes over me we get the same effect again,
you could be right about me not been impressed with the model and extended monopoles but increased signals are what we see in tests, the only two things that come to mind are changing the gain ( unlikely imho ) or tweaking the takeoff angle the radiation angle or possibly a bit of both,
the sirio has 4 radials and a thinner monopole so id expect it to be a little longer than a stock sigma when tuned to the same frequency, real tests show that extending the monopole too far reduces distant signal strength, what does not tally with eznec is exactly how long you can go before you start going backwards,
i don't know anybody local with nec at all, some locals build antennas but as one of my antenna homebrewing ham friends said he don't care how they work so long as he make the contacts,
yes i think i could see the models, the pics in your album look larger and easier to see
