And this is the important thing to remember here. There is plenty of anecdote to suggest they perform quite well, including my own experience with them. I have worked a reasonable amount of single yagi 2m EME (around a dozen DXCC confirmed) from a very noisy inner city location where other antennas didn't allow me to hear a thing. I was being heard alright, but not even seeing a hint of the other guys until I went to the LFA yagi. I was even able to occasionally see signals on moonrise at 30deg away from my major noise source which could at times be 5x9+. I also had a number of times where I was seeing JT65 decodes from a single yagi station in Europe on my moonset. Ground gain obviously played an important part there, but there is no disputing the relative receive performance improvement with the LFA.VK2OMD wrote:
The ladder line cancellation explanation given by InnovaAntennas for their loop where the sides are almost a half wave apart is plainly nonsense.
This is not to suggest that the LFA might not be a good antenna, but that if it is, it is not for all the reasons given by InnovaAntennas.
Owen
I went the LFA path BEFORE the American partner in the business came along, and so before the American-style marketing hype ramped up with all these, to my mind, detrimental claims for the purposes of selling into a market that likes (almost NEEDS) to be "sold to". I can see where the business and marketing model is coming from in trying to sell a product into such a market, but it's unfortunate that they seem to have taken a few pages out of Cushcraft's book in order to do so (inflated gain figures anybody?). I suppose that at the end of the day, it's like many other things in the contemporary world where people are willing to sell their soul (or at least a piece of it) in order to turn a profit. I find it a little amusing how people don't bat an eyelid at the claims of other manufacturers, but then again, I suppose that at the pointy end of high performance antennas, this company is the one making the loudest nonsensical claims for what is, by all accounts a good product. I think we also need to remember that those of us who give a toss about all this ARE NOT the target market. We are generally more likely to roll our own from the free designs available on the web.
I'm yet to install mine at my new QTH, but one thing I WILL be doing is making some side-by-side comparisons with comparible boomlength YU7EF and DK7ZB designs once time allows. I will readily admit that I purchased my LFA yagis - due to a combination of zero workshop space to build my own, very limited free time and a all my tools being in storage at the time. At the end of the day though, what I am after is an antenna system that WORKS. If the LFA doesn't stack up to the claims in a direct comparison, then I will ditch it,full stop! But in the meantime I have been extremely happy with the performance of the design. The results are there with my results running 2m WSPR when I have had the time to do that, and likewise with my EME results. I cringe when I see people spouting ignorantly about how fantastic their shiny new purchase is that they've paid a lot of money for and need to justify it in their own minds, often with NO comparison with other comparible products, but that is human nature and something I strenuously try to avoid.
Now to start a debate on the claims of some popular/respected low noise preamp manufacturers.....
