Fan vs Fan

 Built another 6/10/15 fan more or less the same as the one at th etop of the hil.  New fan is just up behind the house about 35' above the ground and somewhere around 50' lower in overall elevation compared to the one at the top of the hill.   I had both antenna on the same 4 X 1 switch.  All of my signal reports on both antennas seemed to always come up about 10 db less then what I was reporting.   Propagation has a a lot to do with it however I was suspicious of the  IFL run between the house and the switch 100+' of a good diameter hardline.   

 First thing I did was to move the new antenna to my other 4X1 switch  but it didn't seem too make any difference still was getting on the magnitude of  -10 db over the reports I was handing out.    I terminated the IFL to the "hill" switch  with a 50 ohm  load and swept the IFL with the Nano.   I had a "spare " line of the same IFL and swept it too and compared both .   

IFL feeding the "hill" 4X1 switch 

Spare IFL 

So ya ,  both IFLs are good...phew.  Going from the house to the hill the IFL is burried ,  about 30' and its a pin to replace it.   

This morning I flipped between the new fan and the old one on top of the hill  over a 1 hour period.  15m propagation came into play from time to time but flipping back and forth keeping the transmission numbers about the same should take propagation out of the equation. 

Existing 15/10/6 Fan on the top of the hill. VA3IMI

New fan just up behind the house .  VE3LDP

I was really expecting the new 6/10/15 to outperform the old one just simply because the IFL was so much shorter but that isn't what happened.   The antenna on top of the hill has a 360 degree clear LOS vs the one behind the house that has LOS blockage from about 350 deg through 120 deg.    

So the new antenna is coming down and I am going to beef up the antenna on the hill and do a once over on the IFL to ensure its protected against the weather.