Review on 📡 Enhanced TRAM 1480 Base Antenna for Amateur Dual-Band Usage by Johnny Pigao

TL;DR; Perfect 5/7! Pros: - AMAZING SWR on both bands! -Very cheap compared to other well-known offers. -Easy to assemble without instructions if you are mechanically inclined or have good spatial awareness, but the instructions provided were very clear on how to mount the antenna. -Very easy. No problems with picking up the wind or fluctuations in its support. The carving in the antenna itself was well done. It looks like they've swapped out the sintered aluminum parts. BEFORE YOU BEGIN, PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING IF YOU READ: This antenna has a fiberglass casing, which means that when air passes through it, especially dry air, it will build up a static charge. You absolutely MUST ground this antenna at or near the outlet, and I strongly recommend some form of spark gap. Also, make sure your radio is properly grounded. Otherwise, if your power supply is plugged into a particularly stressed circuit, you will see a significant potential between neutral and ground and you will FEEL it when you connect the wire to the radio. Thank you for attending my TED Talk. To be honest this was my first time installing a large antenna on a structure. I reused an old tripod satellite dish mount on the roof of my house and extended it a bit as a base mount for this dish. The antenna installation itself was fairly painless. Contrary to some other reviews, all parts were included. As always, your mileage will vary. For my setup I used an existing discarded RG6 coax as pull cable to pull the LMR400 from my cabin (office) to the antenna location. This was probably the trickiest part as some of the corners were tricky for this cable. Also, the old antenna had a badly corroded, thin ground wire that didn't really give me confidence that it would do more than rotate. Smoking during a strike. So I cleaned the previously used ground rod and ran the new 12ga bare copper wire as short as possible and placed a spark gap arrester at the base of the antenna (just about fits in the tube but no TRAM failure) and one at the in and out disembark at home. For me, soldering the ends of the PL-259 onto the LMR400 was a bit of a challenge and definitely exposed my soldering iron's weakness as the thermal mass is so high that it takes forever for the workpiece to get hot enough to melt and let the solder flow. Because of this I wasn't sure about my connectors as this was my first time working with an LMR400 which didn't have N connectors yet. soldered the connector at the end of the radio, it was the moment of truth. I connected my Nano VNA and did a 2m SWR sweep first. I was shocked. A near perfect ratio of 1:1 at 144MHz and 1.2:1 at 150MHz. I've heard this antenna works well on 2m so I tested it on 70cm. It wasn't exactly a smooth sweep with SWR frequency fluctuations. However. These jumps ranged from 1:1 to 1.4:1 and never exceeded that value, up to 470MHz. I have read and heard that others could not achieve such a low SWR. I think this is probably due to two factors. First, the two sections must be inserted exactly like this. There is a black line on the fiberglass body that shows how far you should push them together. Here you can adjust this antenna if needed by slightly changing its length. I started with this black line so it looks just right. Additionally, the included radials must be fully threaded into the base of the spool before tightening the locknuts. This affects the length of the radials, and if they aren't as far apart as they used to be, the length is wrong and your SWR will be affected. I hope this helps some of you who don't have experience with standout features. I was completely blown away by the tuning of this antenna. The performance was amazing. I meet repeaters 80 miles away and simplex with my club members is no longer a problem. So far it's been very exciting and now I know what the term "total silence" sounds like on my local repeaters. Now they're so quiet I can barely hear the hangtime. I would highly recommend this antenna to relatively new radio amateurs like myself, especially if you spend a lot of time with local repeaters. Any criticism of this antenna would be due to the coil pack on the base and the sintered aluminum mounts used to attach the base tube that holds the antenna. The threads were awful and very jagged which took some TLC to make sure everything was nice and smooth and the included screws didn't cross. Once everything was up and running, I sealed all edges of the interface with silicone gasket, including the connector (The bigger the ball, the better the job, amirite?). I am very happy with this antenna and it has given me a great opportunity to be proud of my work.