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Originally Posted by KJ4BAE  I just put up a super hawk, the 2 element signal engineering antenna and you are right the feeding is opposite of what it should be. I put this thing together and i still cant figure out why it is like this. It is really confusing but the antenna works very well. |
Thanks KJ4BAE, IMO the difference is due to the SE being a voltage fed antenna where the wire is continuous while the traditional quads are current fed and have the resonant wire joined together at an insulator. Your SuperHawk tuner is a bit different in design compared to Drifter’s L4+ or L6, because your SH’s boom is not long enough to appear as a resonant ground element for the feeder to work against, so SE adds this floating ground side wire parallel to the open ended feeder. IMO, this is a very efficient feeder that transitions the impedance very smoothly from the coax end directly into the radiator---transforming the high impedance radiator to that of the feed line, while this is basically end feeding a resonant ½ wave element. The other half of the quad also contributes to the radiation of any quad design, but that is difficult for me to describe.
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Originally Posted by Drifter Hello, Mine has it's horizontal at 3 o clock and vertical at 6 o clock.... She has been up three years now first as the Lightning 4+. which worked great as a 4 but I wanted more so I bought the upgrade kit which stretched the boom and added two more directors. As a 4 element she was fairly easy to tune.. When I upgraded I had some interference issues from my kids swing set and fort and fence and my neighbor's car parked on the other side of the fence. When I fold the tower over the antenna gets very close to those items. A lot of trial and error and cranking up and down till I got the numbers I wanted on the MFJ. I am scared to make any changes but I have to install upgraded coax and the upgraded feed system from Signal Engineering to accomodate more output. The Quad is currently being fed with LMR 400uf soon to be upgraded to LMR 600UF coax. The 2meter has 213 coax feeding it. |
Thanks for the confirmation Drifter. I believe you when you describe the interference issues you noticed in your yard. I tried to install my Long John 5 element at my location and I was never able to get a reasonable tune even tuning about 25’ high on a 18’ roof deck on my home. The antenna was overly sensitive to everything within 40’ - 50’ feet. Maybe if I could have raised it up to 40’ feet or more it would have worked fine. I ended up putting my 4 element back up and did not have the problem.
Can you describe for us what the new power upgrade is? This must be something new from SE.
but I have to install upgraded coax and the upgraded feed system from Signal Engineering to accomodate more output. 
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