Will the ole duck antennas be making a come back?

Hey all, just discovered this site, and this is first post, I think this falls under “interesting” and I checked for similar posts.
So I saw a video on youtube today (I’ll post link below) from the guys at painless360, where they did some technical testing of a linear antennas. They were trying to find if the little dipole whip antenna that comes standard on whoops, micros and some toothpicks would work better with a linear cheapo duck antenna that most of us pitch in the trash, over a circular polarized antenna. I’ve always just used RHCP Triump or Aomway with a patch on my diversity on anything with whip.

Well the results really surprised me, with a linear duck type antenna, they were getting easily 2-3db more signal strength, than with a clover or pagoda style antenna. Then when they added a patch on diversity along with the duck, it shot up a couple more db. I also read an article on the same subject, and that more n more racers are going with dipole linear antennas, on their 5" quads. One, for the form factor, (they make a nice short duck type one, for quads, with sma connector), and two because with racers usually in an open field with few obstacles, they claim the image has far fewer break ups or static, although the image quality is a tad poorer, but not enough to matter. Oh and to their surprise they said, they rarely walk on each other of overlap signals.

So what do you all think? Has anyone tried this yet? Well I don’t have all the fancy testing equipment, but I’ll run some plain ole video comparisons. I just ordered some of the linear antennas. I’ll post the results.

Video of antenna test - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2SaOBe1pKA&t=6s

Shorty linear antenna - https://www.ebay.com/itm/5-8G-3dBi-55mm-Short-FPV-Linear-Antenna-Vertical-SMA-RP-SMA-FPV-RC-Drone/183559903652?hash=item2abd05d9a4:m:mxhhJJ3NrBUPI_8hEs-f6dw

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So I was flying one of the linear antenna at the weekend. I’d got an old RP-SMA antenna. I usually use SMA but I needed to replace the antenna cable and had no ufl to SMA, so I used an RP-SMA. The results were really surprising and I was amazed I was getting a better signal than normal.
I may do some more investigation into this.
Thanks for posting :slight_smile:

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