Mobile Antennas
This is an area of hot competition among antenna manufactures. I am not going to cover how to mount your mobile antenna (Radio Shack sells everything you need to mount antennas), but the basic mobile antenna designs that most mobile antennas manufactures are using today. If you have just started reading my page and are new to antennas, you are going to be confused. You cannot just jump right into putting together an antenna without learning a few things about them first. You have to read “Antennas Basics”, “Coax Basics” and the “Verticals” sections first before you tackle this section. First we need to introduce a new term that we will be using to rate mobile antennas (gain really isn’t a good thing to use, since mobile antennas generally have no gain), “antenna efficiency”. This is how well the antenna converts your power (watts) to signal instead of wasting it as heat. An efficient antenna puts most of the power out as signal, so the range of 95-99% is a perfectly efficient radiator (all antennas waste some power, none are 100% efficient). Most base station antennas are 95-99% efficient. Say you are using 100 watts, and your antenna converts 95 watts to signal and turns the remaining 5 watts into heat, this is a 95% efficient antenna. Continue reading