The worst Scanner Aerials ?

[Allan666]

I will start the Ball rolling.
I have had radio scanners now for over 40 years and have tried most Aerials. The worst Aerials I have found are of the "Discone" type !!
So what do I use. Homemade Aerial coupled together with a white vertical Tri-band Ham TX Aerial at 20 feet off the side of my house.
What Aerial do you use on your Radio Scanner ?
What have you found to be a poor Scanner aerial ?

[ch25]

Never had bad rx antenna. Maybe because I DIY them all
For HF rx I use Miniwhip installed circa 100m from buildings, k9ay and BOG time to time.
CHris

[Andy]

I have receivers (including scanners) that between them cover from 9 kHz to 3.5 GHz. For HF to 30 MHz I use an outdoor Wellbrook loop.
From there to about 120 MHz I have a homebrew 'nest' of dipoles in the loft. Local noise is a problem in this range.
As I'm not much interested in airband , the next up is an amateur radio Yagi for the 432 MHz band. It seems to work well from about 400 to 500 MHz. I do most of my listening somewhere in this band.
Going up, the next is an outdoor vertical dipole cut for about 1000 MHz. It's good for wireless baby alarms etc around 860 MHz and seems to work OK on the 1296 MHz amateur band.
Not anything dedicated to the area above 1296 MHz.
I like to catch video from drones, so I have an ex-military colinear for 5.8 GHz on the mast. It's a thick, stubby thing that looks a bit rude. It's connected to a mast-head down converter which whacks the frequency down to UHF to feed my FM TV receiver in the shack.

The worst antennas I've ever tried are the discone types. They do receive everywhere, but only a bit.
I think if you want something that will receive quite well in the two busiest parts of the bands, a vertical, dual-band antenna intended for the 2 metre (144 MHz) and the 70 centimetre (432 MHz) bands will do pretty well. These amateur bands are quite close to the PMR and utility bands, so the antennas work well there.

[paulears]

I still have a Discone I bought in 1985 - it's the most forgiving antenna, even though I have and sell, many others. It's survived numerous moves and despite having no gain, is the antenna that's the most used - out of four antennas - the discone, a 156MHz dipole, a D30 dual band and a quad band vertical. Of course beams are great but they're not omni - which I need. I love them. They ALWAYS work when you dial in a frequency - virtually anywhere. Mine is resonant at 70, 145, 435 and not too bad between 118-136 and 430-460. I'm very happy with it.