I recently purchased the Sierra Antennas Just In Case Emergency antenna system.  I think it looks really cool with its red tripod and all but wasn’t sure how well it could possible work.  So I decided to get one and try it out.

I have several radios that I wanted to try it out with including an FT-897, 857 and 817.  It certainly was easy to set up per the instructions.  It took about 15 minutes to set up the first time but only because I was double checking everything.

For practice I took it down and put it back up several times and the average time dropped to about 5 minutes.

So I now set out to do some testing. The radio I decided to use at first was the FT-817. First testing VHF/UHF receive and then HF receive. The HF antenna appeared to have a pretty high Q which is to be expected and I was able to easily pull in WWV on 10mhz and the CW Beacons on 14.1, 18, 21 and 24mhz.

The VHF/UHF didn’t seem to be performing as well as I had hoped. I compared the receive signal from the Just In Case with the built in rubber ducky that came with the FT-817 and there just wasn’t much difference. So while the compact VHF/UHF antenna would fit nicely in the case I wanted better performance.

It turns out that I had a 5/8 wavlength mobile antenna for VHF/UHF so I wondered if I could get that to work in place of the antenna that came with the Just in Case. So I mounted it up did some SWR measurements did a sweep with my antenna analyzer across both bands and was satisfied that it should work… but would it ?

Sure enough it seemed to bring in about twice as much signal as the Sierra antenna. I was very satisfied. Of course it wouldn’t fit in the case so that is the disadvantage.