During the Corona / pandemic times I started my refurbishing project of the second antenna tower on my roof. It was last 10 years just in use to carry 4 different ground plane antennas
- Diamond X510 N VHF/UHF
- Diamond X 7000 VHF/UHF/SHF
- Diamond V2000 6m/VHF/UHF
- Diamond X300N VHF/UHF
All antennas were assembled myself and installed in 2011 to the tower. At that time was it a honor to have the 4 antennas on the roof and the flexibility to use them with different radio or just for receiving purpose.
The radios connected:
X7000 to a YAESU FT 736 for VHF / UHF and SHF
X300 to a Kenwood TMD 710
V2000 to a FT 847
X510N to a Alpha Delta switch and to different radios, most time to my ICOM R 9000 receiver
So far so good.......
Suddenly in 2016 04 2017 i could not hear any SHF / 23 cm repeater anymore... as I am not really interested in.. I always thought... one day we will replace the antennas
Now the time came... and i was shocked to see how low the quality of the antennas was after 10 year. I n the past they were made in japan and made with Japanese quality approach... now they are designed in japan and made wherever...
The X7000 was just fixed by the cable connected with the Ecoflex 10 cable. We were able to take the antenna just out of the support pipe... all glue was complete gone.. the antenna was not fixed anyhow.
The antenna was full of water, the water was inside the antenna base and mount into the cable... we cut the cable and even after 1 m was still water in. That never happened to the original quality
The X300 and V2000 were still in function, but lost all white painting.
The X 510N broke during the dissembling and was also without any painting.
All the fiberglass surface was kind of “cream” on the surface. Wherever you touched, you got the white color pigments to your hands and had to wash.
What a disappointment.... where is the Japanese quality gone... ???
.
|