Thanks Everyone for your Antenna Input.
The antenna shown must be very sharply pointed in the right direction to work at all. Small adjustments so that it points more up or down make a big difference.
Small adjustments turning the pointing angle even a few degrees makes a big difference.
There doesn't seem to exist a better place within two feet along the corrugated wall it is perching upon of the present spot that works better or works at all.
I have no room for a multi-bowtie type of antenna vertically facing the signal path. I did construct a 3-bowtie one of my own, but it failed miserably. and mounting this contraption on the balcony would be an eyesore.
See the attached drawing I made that shows the construction of the horizontal polarized wing-shaped antenna I am now using.
Notice that it is made of two aluminum stampings, each piece is stamped from a thin piece of aluminum sheet and the two pieces are vertically stacked on a 1/2-in rectangular piece of plastic that is the boom.
The top and bottom pieces are mirror images of each other(In my drawing, the red and the black).
I didn't complete the red mirror image, but one easily visualize it is just the same shape with complete mirrored symmetry, and they are separated by the 1/2-in rectangular plastic boom.
How it even works at all is a complete mystery, the fact that it outperforms any planar flat vertically polarized rectangular antenna I've tried is impressive.
I am getting standing waves. Literally, if I stand at the side of my flatscreen TV at a 90-deg angle(standing at the side facing the balcony, I can, by just standing there at this position, improve the signal strength from a breaking-up pixel square salad to a clear picture!
FAQs
1) The feed impedance of a dipole antenna is around 75-ohms.
2) I am using high quality 75-ohm foam coax and
I am connecting the coax directly to the short most-front mirror-imaged elements. I feed the coax through the square plastic boom and connect to the input of my VHF/UHF antenna pre-amp as close as possible to coax exit point coming out of the rectangular plastic boom at the back of the antenna.
3)I tried to make the antenna-connect to the antenna pre-amp 1/4-wavelength to ensure the best impedance match, but I the boom is a bit too long for this so my impedance-matching coax cable is optimized in length for a much lower frequency.
4) I thought maybe use a balun, but the impedance is already matched at 75-ohms,
Not good, I am feeding a balanced antenna into unbalanced coax.5)I tried making a coax balun from a winding it upon a 1/4-in toroid core salvaged out of a 75-ohm coax signal splitter, but it I could barely get a signal. I think I think the problem might have been that I made a 4:1 balun.
6)I
tried instead to connect the 75-ohm coax directly(as the feedpoint) to the rearmost elements..didn't work at all.
7)
The length of the elements and their spacing on this gizmo antenna are not close the 600-MHz resonant length desired, except for the rear-most element This means I might do better if I construct an antenna with all elements close to a 600-MHz 1/4 wavelength. (
How does this thing work so well at all!)
I should be able to do better than this!But how?