WHAT IS THE BEST ANTENNA (ARRAY) FOR MS? COMMENTS BY VE7BQH You have to keep E and H plane beamwidth clearly in your mind, NOT just mixes of different antennas. You certainly are clear when you talk about beamwidths in relationship with what is good for MS. Before I give you some thoughts on antennas, let me say I ran meteors with Mike Staal for many months back about 1970. We both were using 160 el collinears. End result was these were POOR antennas for MS. Yes, we got LOUD pings but not much of them. The distance was optimum at 900 mi. The old arguments about certain antennas were somewhat flawed as the Yagi designs of the type you mention were not good. The collinear was very successful in those days because it actually worked like it should. The Yagis, W2NLY included were very so so compared to today's antennas. Today that is not the situation. Yagi design IS perfected, PERIOD! My conclusions were like others, you cannot use an antenna with too narrow a beamwidth. You miss to much. So you have to strike a happy medium. A box of 4 W1JR 8 el antennas (12') has 17+ dBd gain and a 18 X 20 degree beam width. A single 7.7 WL Yagi (52') has less gain and a wider beamwidth. So you can see by today's standards, the box of 4 is not low gain or wide beamwidth. Gain and beamwidth are directly related. The thing that I observed that worked the best for longer haul stuff was to stack 2 X 3.6 WL - 4.0 WL Yagis in the H or vertical plane. This does NOT lower the angle but it does concentrate the power in the main lobe. I saw this arrangement used very effectively by stations looking out over 1100 mi. In summary it is an age old struggle to offset gain vests beamwidth. It would appear about a 4 WL Yagi or a M^2 2M5WL at max is as far as you can go with the vertical stacking a good approach if you are wanting to "stretch your legs". A 20 element CC collinear is interesting however, in that the gain is only 12 dBd BUT the beamwidth is E = 48 and the H = 27. In other words it is narrow vertically compared to very wide horizontally. This is ideal for MS. A pair side by side would make excellent long haul MS array as the gain would be 15 dBd and the pattern 24 X 27. Lionel, VE7BQH ve7bqh@wimsey.com NOTE - for a long listing of various 144 MHz antennas, their gains and patterns, download the document 144GT1.ANT