I am wanting to take my (homebrew) tunable, active antenna for shortwave reception to the next level, and make it independant of an external antenna. To do this I have installed two 43" whips which I would like to have working in tandem. They are spaced approx. 5.5 inches apart, and capable of being spread to any angle through hinge-joints (sorry, I don't know what that is called.) Question is, just for plain-vanilla operation, can I attach both of their leads to my RF input and expect some sort of useful result? I am planning on using an impedance-matching setup such as was described in the July 2001 QST article about the Miracle Whip antenna (The Miracle Whip: A Multiband QRP Antenna, PP 32-35) . I am wondering if I need something like an NE/SA602 or 612 mixer to condition the antenna inputs before feeding them to my RF amplification stages, in case the two signals are out of phase with each other (a distinct probability, I suspect.)
If anyone would care to comment, I'm all ears.
Thanks for any input.
Dave