trombo
02-07-2009, 02:45 AM
Building a Parabolic Reflector UHF Antenna?
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The parabolic was hugely successful for UHF when Channel Master had its CM4251 on the market, but their costs to fabricate it were too high and when they came up with the CM4228 it was close enough in performance and a lot less of a hassle to mount so they discontinued the big dish. AntennaCraft offered a competitor but it was said to have been poorly fabricated and the tolerances were too loose to guarantee consistent performance. You can find lots of the CM4251s still up and running in the U.S. but they're old now and not worth the trouble of buying.
Nowadays Wade Antenna continues to market giant parabolics for CATV head ends (in single or double mounts) with the selling point not being their very high absolute gain but rather their phenomenal dBv output, allowing much better signal distribution options with little or no amplification needed until much further down the distribution chain. : http://www.otatalk.com/showthread.php?p=2705#post2705
The big single-dish CATV parabolic from Wade is minimum about $3,000 but you also really need to have their engineers consult on your head end tower's ability to hold one of those, amongst other things like the electronics and signal properties.
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The parabolic was hugely successful for UHF when Channel Master had its CM4251 on the market, but their costs to fabricate it were too high and when they came up with the CM4228 it was close enough in performance and a lot less of a hassle to mount so they discontinued the big dish. AntennaCraft offered a competitor but it was said to have been poorly fabricated and the tolerances were too loose to guarantee consistent performance. You can find lots of the CM4251s still up and running in the U.S. but they're old now and not worth the trouble of buying.
Nowadays Wade Antenna continues to market giant parabolics for CATV head ends (in single or double mounts) with the selling point not being their very high absolute gain but rather their phenomenal dBv output, allowing much better signal distribution options with little or no amplification needed until much further down the distribution chain. : http://www.otatalk.com/showthread.php?p=2705#post2705
The big single-dish CATV parabolic from Wade is minimum about $3,000 but you also really need to have their engineers consult on your head end tower's ability to hold one of those, amongst other things like the electronics and signal properties.
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