So my first “real antenna” I grabbed was the Chameleon MPAS 2.0 setup. Prior to that I had a few home brew antennas and a few Amazon purchases, but nothing “amazing”. At that time I was struggling to tune an antenna and heard about this magical broadband vertical antenna from chameleon and decided to give it a try.
My initial setup was with just the mpas kit. shortly after I bought the 17’ and 25’ whips and then the faraday strips.
The chameleon out of the box sets up easily and definitely shows a reasonably low swr across the bands and definitely got me a ton of contacts. It wasn’t until I tried the CaHR Hydra using the same 17’ whip that I realized that the chameleon is quite lossy.
I don’t hate the chameleon, in fact I like it a lot, but the price point for it is just to damn high for how lossy it is. For 1/3 the price you can setup a hydra and a 17’ whip and have better performance. The only issue is that the hydra does require you to adjust the whip length as you change bands vs the chameleon which is broadband and doesn’t require adjustments.
So the question is, is a stronger signal that reaches out further and clearer but requires adjustments as you change hands better for your situation? Or is a single antenna that performs probably 30% worse, but doesn’t require adjustments, better?
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