One more antenna question: Antenna pitch?

It depends on how close in you are to the transmitter mast. Look at cell phone sites beside roads. The flat panel antennas on those masts are angled down significantly to avoid shadowing around the mast. As I said earlier in this thread, I experienced a real life example of the effect of antenna tilt at the bottom of a hill, close in to a transmitter that was on the top of the hill. Nothing will affect the actual 'gain' of the antenna when it's mounted in reasonably free space. However, tilting, under *some* circumstances, may improve its ability to interact with the radiated field from the transmitter, resulting in an increase in the received signal level, relative to a no-tilt situation.

Arfa

If tilting the antenna made a difference then the receiver is very close to the transmitter.

If the proximity was that close you could use rabbit ears.

Yes, I'll go along with that. In the case that I cited, the receiver *was* close to the transmitter, which was an amateur TV repeater with a 10 watt input (less cable losses) to the antenna. All of this discussion is pretty academic anyway, and I was just indicating that as well as on paper, in the real world, antenna tilt *can*, under some unusual circumstances such as this, have a significant effect, the implication being that if you extend that out across the board, it *is* a real effect, allbeit of no significance in the vast majority of cases.

I think it is highly unlikely that it would be a noticeable effect for the OP, but may be visible on a signal strength meter, given that he is proposing using a very long multi-element antenna (at VHF I think ?) - which I guess he must be thinking of using because of potentially marginal reception conditions - and which will have a comparitively narrow beamwidth in both the horizontal, and vertical planes.

Arfa