Heres the beast on the car (27th March 2006), no horizontal stations worked yet, will update here when I have, see below.
QTH: Clieves Hills Lane, Aughton; IO83
I have been driving about locally a few times with the halo. I have noticed that I can hear GB3ANG on 144.453 quite well, the Kent beacon on 144.430 isnt quite as strong in the locations I have checked upto now, conditions are not the best for testing I guess as they are not very strong even at home with the beam, so hearing them at all on the halo is quite amazing for me.
Places heard using the wire halo mobile utilising CW as the recive mode. When signals are stronger I will check out the carrier on FM to see if it tends to break-up in noise (Just like a very weak mobile station just coming in and out of the noise).
GB3ANG: Aughton, Skem, Dalton (by becon country park), Ormskirk, Parbold hill, Southport, Billinge hill.
GB3VHF: Aughton, Skem, Dalton, some areas of Ormskirk, Parbold hill, Billinge hill (terrible break-through), though this beacon is much weaker, more tests on the 29th March (with luck) to try again (29th March GB3VHF was peaking at S9 at times with a gen sig of about S3 most times, but never garanteed a steady signal as always with any distant signal.
Update.. March
From the location above; Clieves Hills Lane, Aughton, West Lancs, (SD384072), I noticed that GB3VHF was very weak, so after a few calls on 144.300. I was very surprised when M0FGH responded to my call (Gillingham, Kent), we moved to 144.310 SSB and exchanged a few words, i didnt get my report as signals were very weak, but non the less the halo worked with 7 watts going into it, many thanks to Steve with his super setup that made it possible.
The design for the halo was taken from here: http://home.comcast.net/~buck0/2m_halo.htm its quite easy to follow so why not see if you can hear any beacons from your QTH and let me know if you can hear them using it, or perhaps try the not-so difficult design of the humble dipole?. I am tying out other "halo" type designs too.
Halo number two on test: April
Heres some images of the halo which are also on the Yahoo Horizontal FM user group website
The match was* OK in the shack, however, out on the field it was way out, the SWR was well high, still some tweaking needed here. I thought that the "delta" match was an appropiate way to feed the dipole, I also used a halfwave coax balun to balance up the antenna. The results in the shack were so promising too, I could hear GB3ANG! and normally thats very quiet even on the boomer!.
Result = dissapointing.