[Premium-Rx] B&W Antenna for sale

[Bob Betts]

Hello Group:
This topic was covered in great detail on the yahoo antenna group and some of that info may bear repeating here.
The B&W folded dipole is actually a T2FD that was developed more than a half-century ago. As a product of the cold war, it went into countless installations at embassies around the world. B&W has enjoyed one of the longest contract arrangements ever, with the US military and government agencies, as well. Like any engineering design effort, there is always a compromise between quality, quantity, and cost. A racing car gets bad mileage; and a "green" car shouldn't be on the race track. The same applies to the T2FD.
Its low gain, and on some bands, bad gain, is a trade off for loading flatness over a very large range of bands. These antennas are (and have been) the defacto HF antenna for TOC (Tactical Operations Center), War Room Comms, LP's (Listening Posts), and (especially) embassy roof tops. I have installed dozens of them here and in Vietnam in the military and later for "other" customers and know exactly what to expect from them when compared to band-specific antennas. But the performance loss is a real advantage for the "clerk-operated" stations where SWR and tuning could be a real problem. In the Signal Corps, we were doing a lot of frequency hopping and the T2FD was virtually always employed. An interesting observation is that when used for intercept or surveillance, one of the pre/postselectors was usually used, due to the broadband characteristics of the antenna -- this was especially true of the early solid state radios where the equipment
 had inadequate front end filtering.
 
Bob


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