Bill.Satellite wrote:
Tom_M
Thanks for the clarification. It explains why something sounded wrong.
The Wingman does not work with the Winegard non-amplified head using it or not using it would make no difference. Also, the non-amplified head used an interior amplifier and not the current power supply used by the current Batwing and the Sensar Pro in it's place would not be the same thing.
The comparisons you have between the Jack and the amplified Batwing with and without the Wingman using the Sensar Pro should be valid but there is no way of knowing how the gain setting or the signal strength reading of the Sensar Pro would effect the Jack as it was never designed to work with that antenna.
I am also not sure of your dB info on the Sensar Pro or what settings you are using. A gain setting of 10 is the default and that setting should be used for all search routines. The gain would only be adjusted up or down if a received signal was too weak or, in rare cases, too strong.
The Wingman is a passive device and works whether the antenna has a built in amplifier or not. It requires no power. It has three director elements that concentrate the UHF RF toward the UHF receive elements in the central hub of the batwing. I know for a fact that it works with the non-amplified batwing. Winegard's literature states that it works with all Sensar antennas. I replaced the original Delta non-amplified antenna with a non-amplified batwing. The wallplate on my coach was a Winegard with amplifier. I was having less than stellar reception so I then added the Wingman. I later replaced this wallplate with the SensarPro. After reading many positive responses about the Jack I decided to give it a try. The amplified batwing comes from my pickup camper that I had prior to my motorhome.
The SensarPro is a 10db amp. The gain setting can be set from 0 to 20. 20 equates to 10db and 0 cuts off the signal completely. I am assuming that the scale is linear but who knows? I chose to set it to 1 (0.5db) for readings of the amplified antennas because that's the lowest that would pass a signal. The SensarPro works well for either the batwing or Jack.
I'm not trying to disprove Jeff's findings. I tried to do as objective of a comparison with the equipment I had. Both of our tests show that the Jack sucks for VHF.
Jeff,
I'm looking forward to your findings on the SensorPro.
