329049,
With your own RFM 151, it sounds like you are a lot better equipped to more rigorously test than I am. Depending on your definition of performance, I suppose my SNR equivalence could be masking relatively large differences in antenna gain. I know it’s less important with digital, but I would dearly love to be able to characterize individual channel signal strengths right at the antenna. I’ve toyed with buying a Spectrum Analyzer to do that and to look through the spectrum for interferer’s, but, just can’t justify the $1,000 – 2,000 cost for my “playing”.
My HDB8X, from Solid Signal, assembled seems to be pretty stout. I’ve carried it by the end caps and they don’t show any signs of coming off (well, I’ll stop that now!). We get higher winds than 50 mph here all the time, in fact, we’ve already had a couple of days with 45 mph gusts and it seems to handle that just fine. Do you recall if all the reflector tube lengths were the same or are the tubes longer where they extend into the wider centers of the end caps?
I have a 40 year old 300 ohm CM-4228 (not the newer –HD) and my wire “whiskers” are riveted through plastic stand-offs to the wires interconnecting the bays. Since it is so old, I wish I could take it apart to clean the “pressure points” although performance wise it was still competitive with my new 91XG.
All of my LA stations are 1 & 2 edge @ ~ 52 miles and San Diego stations are 1 & 2 edge @ ~ 88 miles. Oriented towards LA both antennas showed very similar SNR. Oriented towards San Diego the CM-4228 posted 3-4 dB stronger SNR numbers. I thought at the time this was due to not having the HDB8X alignment optimized.
http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wr...1dda169109ca5c
I hope you will continue to report your results and detail any improvements you develop.