Panorama Antenna Install / AVDFH-B
Having tried several mag mounts and not being particularly happy with them, wires trailing everywhere, scratches to the paint work and all that I decided I’d got for a permenent antenna install, trouble is, what? what do you go for?
Yeah yeah, the SG7900 is a lovely performing antenna for sure but it looks like I’m emulating the dodgem car look!
I just wanted a nice, simple, discrete antenna at the expence of a few dBi and after having a read around I settled on the Panroama AVDFH-B, yeah, bit of a mouthfull and not easy to remember hence me writing this so I can.
The AVDFH-B is listed as a dual band antenna and should be resonant on the VHF and UHF amateur bands, their spec says it’s suitable for use between 143MHz and 156MHz on VHF and 434MHz and 467MHz on UHF, and as you can probably read between the lines that it’ll cover PMR446 too.
Now, it’s only a quarter wave monopole using the vehicle body as the groundplane so ideally it wants to be mounted slap bang in the middle of the roof for best performance but lots of gain it doesn’t have unfortunatly, that said, for where I live and what I do a quarter wave is just fine.
The antenna does not come with a base, a separate mounting kit needs to be purchased to suit the antenna, the type of base required for this aerial is “M8”, I plumbed for a through hole item that required me to get busy with the cordless and wince a bit as I drilled a hole in a vehicle with less than a 1000 miles on the clock!
The M8 base comes pre-installed with 5m of Panoramas own CS23 coax, being optically similar to RG58 but much more flexible they say that it performs better and only has a loss Attenuation of 3dB /10m @ 400MHz so having run the coax under the headlining in the van and down the windscreen pillar I worked out I’d lost .5dB through the coax for the install, pleased with that.
The antenna only took a small amount of trimming to centre the resonant frequency in the centre of the bands of interest and gave a surprisignly wide bandwidth for such a narrow whip.
Unfortunatley, Panormama call this a “Legacy product” and as such is missing from their current product range however they are available through Moonraker in the UK as well as a few other outlets and I suspect they are made to order in large batches upon request.
As for the base, as you can see below the mounting height is very low and was a big consideration when choosing an antenna system for the van, the low clearance and ease of mounting makes for a tidier install with no lumps and bumps in the headlining, no one wants to see that! no jangly PL plugs to come loose or leak, nice, clean simple low clearance design that just works.
The quality of the antenna is second to none and as you’d expect for a company that has been doing this for a very long time, I remember as youth seeing these types on antenna on police cars and when 2 way radios were very much in use by local authorities and utility companies, they all had Panroama Antenna.
As I was fitting this to a brand new vehicle then cost was low down the list of priorities, I wanted a nice, well made and durable antenna and the AVDFH-B is just that, the hinge section I believe is made from brass to a high standard and coated with an attractive black finish, the whip from 17-7PH stainless and again finished in black, all fittings are stainless steel too so you know if you need to carry out any maintenance in the future it’s all going to come apart nicely.
All in all I’m very pleased with this antenna, it performs as well as can be expected for a single whip and does me just fine for what i use it for and best of all you can hardly tell it’s there!