Home base A99

Hi ALL

Can of worms.. just brought an Antron A99 for use as a home base use, leave as standard or fit a fire-up top section... 

Thank you for any feed back

Cheers

Standard worked well when i had one but that was when they first came out.

Some say they work with fire up and the radial kits too some dont I think its personal choice, I used one standard use get good copies with it , in fact I've I still have it for my spare antenna

Leave it as standard, the FireUp top section is nothing more than a wallet emptier. Tried one, noticed zero difference.

Personally I'd get the radial kit. You may not notice any difference in transmitted and received signals depending if you were lucky enough with the mast/length of coax you used and any noted improvement in signal strength would be marginal but if you were unlucky with mast length you'd get reduced noise/interference with a ground plane kit and less chance of causing TVI and interference to neighbours electronics because your coax wouldn't be getting used to compensate for lack of RF ground and the coax wouldn't be spewing RF anywhere.

I would also spend some money and either get a FT240-43 toroid and make a RF choke or buy a pre-made one and stick that as close to the antenna feedpoint as possible. I have one that comes with a SO239 socket on and I used a PL259-PL259 adapter to fit it directly to the antenna. Just another thing to ensure your coax is decoupled from the antenna and not being used as a RF ground which means common mode RFI which means noise and interference to you and others.