I would like to use these on VHF or UHF if we can. I just don’t seem to be able to grasp what antenna is for what.
The only thing I’m sure of is they both have an NMO mount. My guess would be they are VHS because of the apparent length. But they could be dual band VHS/UHF antennas. Try to clean up the bases and see if you can find any printing on them either brand or maybe even frequency range numbers. If you have access to an swr meter you could hook them up to a radio and see what the swr is with what ever radio you are using. If you have a antenna analyzer that would be even better, it would allow you to know what the antennas are tuned for. You can try to figure out what the tuned frequency is by measuring the length and then figure out the wave length or fraction there of, although they both look like they may had some type of coil/load on them.
You won’t damage your radio by making short transmissions to see if you can TX/RX with another like radio.
I’m curious why you want to use them? Finding antennas like these randomly, in used condition probably means they were removed from use, and people rarely do that for fun, unless their enthusiasts. Work antennas stay on the vehicles and boats till they fail. Worse still, if they are from boats or police vehicles, they will operate on bands most folk cant use? A marine antenna will sort of work on the ham bands, or business bands, but not very well.
I’d have to agree with portions of both previous answers. The one with the load looks more like a two band than the other, but both appear to be VHF. As far as the NMO connectors either the spring probe is broken off or these are some reverse NMO. The won’t work with the standard NMO mount. Cleaning the corrosion from these beauties will be a real task. For my money I’d suggest taking them out to the middle of the lake and dropping them in.
Thank you. I need to clean these up and see if there are any markings though looking over them I didn’t see anything.
What I did do, which probably isn’t wise, was remove the shaft of the dual band antenna from the base and screwed it onto a base that had a CB antenna attached. Doing this I was able to pick up broadcasts from another park about an hour away (they do have a great repeater). Certainly not proper of course.
My radio is an old Kenwood tk-231a I believe. It is too old to use for work since we use DCS and this radio cannot do that, but it can monitor which is handy. Basically this is a battery saver for my handheld work radio, and not meant for broadcast. I would like to find a proper base regardless.
Well…the antenna on your left appear to be an NMO type antenna and you would need to buy an NMO fitting that has the coax attached to it for it to work. Also, it might be a UHF antenna or a Dual Band antenna. The antenna on your right, looks to be a UHF antenna as well. Hopefully the will be someone who would know for sure…
One of them should. The antenna that the author is holding is holding is DEFINATELY an NMO and will screw into the NMO base with no problem.
You’re correct there. Different antenna bases are made for different antenna’s and are NOT made to be interchangeable. Keep that bit of info in mind for future reference…
