Thank you for reading this.
I'm in the process of setting up my satellite station after a five year break and my UHF aerial doesn't seem to be performing as well as I expect it should. I always suspected that it's performance was below par. AO-51, for instance, is received no better than strength 3 on my FT-847.
The aerial is a twelve element design (twelve elements in each plane) by DK7ZB and is without a doubt the best 435MHz aerial that I have ever built. The extra twelve elements have been removed for testing purposes and is currently hand held and rotated as accurately as possible.
I suspect that the poor gain might be due to the matching system because I was always unsure of the exact physical length of parallel quarter wave matching cable. The element lengths are spot on and the element spacing is within a millimetre of the design figures. The SWR, even after all this time, is still around 1.2:1. The Belden 9913 cable connecting the aerial to the radio is only nine metres long and, as best I can tell, has a about a half DB loss.
I would like to make e-mail contact with anyone who may have built this aerial or one of the other UHF designs by DK7ZB.