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The Dominator

First transmitter I built/maintained was from Veronica and, at the time, it was the best you could buy in kit form. Paul at AAREFF is a great guy who helped me with hours of work when I was designing an FM for a Caribbean country. I wish he'd get his transmitters certified for LPFM!
 
The article in Radio World fully explains what is happening with Progressive Concepts taking over Norwalk Electronics and the future of the NWE-34 antenna. The founder of Norwalk, Donald Casavecchia Jr, is retiring and PC is making the antennas in their own facility. Since they only have a limited number of 250 watt antennas, it seems PC will only be fabricating the 1 kW and 3 kW models while selling off existing stock of 250 watt made by Norwalk.

www.radioworld.com

Progressive Concepts Acquires Norwalk Electronics - Radio World

Progressive Concepts has acquired Norwalk Electronics from its founder Donald Casavecchia Jr.
www.radioworld.com www.radioworld.com
 
Dominators creator helped me build my pirate station 22-23 years ago
 
Nice to see PC will be making the NWE-34 "at home".......originally the antenna was made in Italy by Sirio and imported.
Perhaps the metric hardware will now be SAE....???
 
Penetration my friend. This antenna is like the old joke about the inventor of ice dying and taking the recipe with him. The guy who came up with the design some 65 years ago, died without ever really explaining his creation.
But I will tell you this, it’s magic. You don’t have to understand the engineering or technical part of it. It’s already done. I simply call what it does magic. I choose it because it’s magic. Urban penetration magic.
 
I am 17 miles from a Class B NCE that is vertical only. My home Yagi antenna is horizontal and pointed right at them. No signal from them. But I can hear others much further away. Eric at Progressive Concepts has some great antennas that are duo polarization. It's worth the extra bucks to buy one of them.
 
RF101 said:
The question remains "Why are only NCEs allowed to go V-only?"
Click to expand...
It was a compromise designed to allow more NCE stations in areas where they'd otherwise have been impossible because of protection to (H-only) channel 6 stations.

The FCC's presumption, outdated though it is, is that both FM and TV reception is based on H-pol outdoor antennas at 30 feet.
 
fybush said:
It was a compromise designed to allow more NCE stations in areas where they'd otherwise have been impossible because of protection to (H-only) channel 6 stations.

The FCC's presumption, outdated though it is, is that both FM and TV reception is based on H-pol outdoor antennas at 30 feet.
Click to expand...
After extensive testing using an FM CP that was not yet on the air officially, I decided on vertical only for all my 5 FMs.

The city and area is very "hilly". So we tried a variety of single bay antennas that could be rotated 90° to be either vertical or horizontal in just a few moments after a short climb up the tower. The location was inside an urban area of about 1.2 million people, and near the geographic center. It was about 300 meters above the true center of the city.

We made a list of a couple of dozen sites we could drive to in a single day, and did two total runs... vertical with a vertical receiving antenna, vertical with a horizontal receiving antenna, horizontal with both vertical and horizontal antennas.

We used a simple read off the pre-AGC of a car radio as well as an evaluation of the audio arriving and leaving each monitor point.

The overwhelming conclusion was that our market and terrain was vastly improved with just vertical.

A year or so later, we built a circularly polarized antenna, and did the same thing... but late at night as the station was then operating commercially. We found that adding "horizontal" did not help, and in the hilliest area where signals reflected from several "hills" it was worse.

(The highest of the "hills" was just over 15,600 feet AMSL)
 
DavidEduardo said:
After extensive testing using an FM CP that was not yet on the air officially, I decided on vertical only for all my 5 FMs.

The city and area is very "hilly". So we tried a variety of single bay antennas that could be rotated 90° to be either vertical or horizontal in just a few moments after a short climb up the tower. The location was inside an urban area of about 1.2 million people, and near the geographic center. It was about 300 meters above the true center of the city.

We made a list of a couple of dozen sites we could drive to in a single day, and did two total runs... vertical with a vertical receiving antenna, vertical with a horizontal receiving antenna, horizontal with both vertical and horizontal antennas.

We used a simple read off the pre-AGC of a car radio as well as an evaluation of the audio arriving and leaving each monitor point.

The overwhelming conclusion was that our market and terrain was vastly improved with just vertical.

A year or so later, we built a circularly polarized antenna, and did the same thing... but late at night as the station was then operating commercially. We found that adding "horizontal" did not help, and in the hilliest area where signals reflected from several "hills" it was worse.

(The highest of the "hills" was just over 15,600 feet AMSL)
Click to expand...
I had a similar experience here in Florida where everything is flat for practical purposes. In this case it was with a 250 translator at 70 ft AAT. I switched from circular to vertical only , same erp and found that vertical only worked as well as circular and with half the transmitter output.
 
In discussing the characteristics of the Dominator in other radio circles I found something curious. Those who have used this antenna, were impressed with its performance, those who haven't or aren't familiar with it were either skeptical or hated it. Guess I'll just have to buy one and try it for myself.
 
My experience so far with two dominator antennas:

The first one - an original from Norwalk.
One day the transmitter suddenly started going off and on as the SWR jumped up and down. Upon inspection there seemed to have been some arcing inside the connector. Could have been lightning perhaps, so we bought a new one, this time from Progressive Concepts.

The new one, after about 18 months, suddenly jumped in SWR from 1.0 to 2.1

When we took it down, everything looked okay, the antenna was just weathered (dull metal and not shiny). Tuning on site would not produce a good match. It's now back in the workshop where we will attempt to retune it for a 1:1 SWR.

I will report back shortly...

Performance-wise it is very good, when it is working correctly. The newer version seems more sturdy, especially where the radiator meets the connector.

For now at least, we are using a CP antenna.
 


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