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President Himalaya WB

bob85

Supporting Member
Mar 30, 2005
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Another gainmaster snapped up the road from me last week, my buddy replaced it with the Himalaya WB,
it has crazy wide low vswr bandwidth & seems to work ok, anything that wide smells lossy to me but maybe not,

i guess we will find out what's inside eventually.
 

There is a version with tuning rings like a99/imax but the new WB version has none & has a much wider bandwidth with low vswr than an a99.
 
From what my buddy says about low vswr i can't think of a setup that gives a bandwidth that wide, makes a gainmaster look narrow
 
i know top coupling the element with a capacitor like the gainmaster or x-pole use can broaden the low vswr curve, there could be other tricks i don't know about,

maybe if they are not so wind resistant i will get a look inside.
 
a99 clone,,,, 8 db gain ha!

Midnight Special, IMO this is where the idea that a dipole has 8 db gain. On the front page of W8JI's Website under the Table of Contents heading "ANTENNAS." upload_2017-12-27_17-34-50.png

What is not indicated in the article is the modeled 1/2 wave dipole is horizontal and thus there is said to be ground gain involved in the pattern. The gain is increased due to ground gain.

This is not a fair comparison to a vertical A99, but the manufacture leaves out important this detail when they lie to us about published antenna science by reliable sources.

Below is my Eznec model of W8JI's 1/2 wave dipole similar to the one noted in his article. It does not show quite as much gain, but it closely supports what W8JI tells us in his article. Unfortunately, he leaves out the fact that he is describing a horizontal antenna over real Earth. IMO this leaves this important issue wide open to misrepresentations.

So, Solarcon looks to me to be stretching the truth...just to suit their corrupt business model IMO.
 

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I'm going to buy one of these so we'll see how things go.

The question is how will it be installed, Himalayan spiderplane ? 1/4wave coax trick ? isolated ?,
or just throw it up on a conductive mast & hope you have no cmc issues,

Looking at the WB's vswr curve it has a double dip in the curve like gainmaster 5/8 & x-pole though not as pronounced it has wider bandwith with low vswr,

what we need is strong winds to test them & maybe get a look inside the Himalaya WB
 
anything that wide smells lossy to me but maybe not,

Bob, I don't think this extremely wide bandwidth idea is all it's reported to be either. I didn't believe it when Solarcon made the claim.

I've seen improvements in bandwidth for an antenna model appear to make modest increases in gain. However IMO, something else is probably going on in the process while making small changes to a model.

I will be surprised if this new EFHW wiz-bang antenna performs any better than the A99.

Check out this video:

I see a coil at 0:22 seconds into the video and I don't know what it is, so I asked DrAwesome to explain. However this video was done nearly a year ago, so he might not respond. Read the few comments too.

I'm fairly convinced this is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
 
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