I’m looking at the emcomm 3 portable for my go box. I’m only interested in nvis comms. From what I’ve learned from their site is it should be deployed horizontally at 25’. Has anyone had any experience with these? What’s the repeatability of deployment success like? This will be my first hf antenna

Thx

FWIW I own the EMCOMM II and I have used it as a sloper at under 20' with decent results in a large metropolitan city with the internal turner of the KX2. They make quality products. I own the MPAS as well and have gotten decent results from my antenna analyzer.

I plan on later getting there emcomm3 base to leave up at the house if this on works well. Do they hold up to the elements well?

I had the EMCOMM 2 up as a horizontal at my house as well, at only 6' high, for over a year. It has discoloration from the sun but other than that its in fantastic shape. I would say they hold up just fine.

So how does it do with nvis? Is there a skip zone at all? How far does it reach? I know it’s band dependant

https://www.eham.net/reviews/detail/10895

I also have an Emcomm II in place. It's been my only HF antenna for perhaps five years. It's poorly deployed too - as an "L" at only about 14 feet - but given the HOA situation here, it's the best I have been able to manage. It has held up well, the outer sheath of the radiator succumbed to UV, but I pulled it off and it performs the same as ever. I run it with a Palstar tuner, but the native SWR is pretty livable - nothing worse than 1.3:1 on the phone segments of 20, 40 and 80 meters, but I know there are losses with that transformer.

When I first acquired it, 10 meters was still pretty well open, and I talked into quite a number of European countries, which isn't real easy with 100 watts and a wire from So. Cal. I think it's a compromise antenna, but a fair one given my situation.

I'm a year and a bit from getting out of here and moving to "four land" where we'll be on 18 acres loaded with trees. Don't know if I can have a tower and a beam, but I'm darn sure gonna' have some wire in the air! Cheers...   Jim

HRO talked me into the emcomm2 last weekend.  May try it out this weekend

I have one of their early end fed zepps. Pretty good antenna. One word of caution. The antenna was deployed between 2 trees and where the wire went over a branch the insulation wore thru and exposed the wire over time.  Not chameleons fault. I should have used paracord to suspend it from the branch if it's going to be up awhile. Lesson learned. I would buy again. Hth

I don't own that antenna but I do own A Chameleon antenna and have used the one you are looking at (two of my friends own them).

Chameleon seems to make a very nice quality product. In fact, I was so impressed with the quality appearance of my friends antenna that I decided to take the plunge with the CHA-TD when they were 20% off over the fourth of July.

Wire antennas arn't rocket science. With very few exceptions, one wire antenna will work about the same as any other wire antenna of the approx. the same length and installed in the same conditions (height and all that). So for me, the thing I look at is the quality of the materials used to build it.

You can go on Chameleon's website and download the manual for any of those products and they have a number of different configurations as well as plots of the radiation pattern.

I'll 2nd that opinion.  I was sent a P-loop from the company to use with a KX2 that Elecraft had sent for me to give a whirl.

The build quality appeared superb and robust.  Although I never made a contact with either of the above, I can vouch they are both nice items.

*I sent the KX2 back to Elecraft and sold the Loop to an OP in WA.  
It didn't take me long to see that QRP Operations weren't for me

ETA: when I first got my General, all I wanted to do was NVIS, so I tried a random wire (about 100') and talked all up and down the East Coast.  I've also had good luck with a regular old dipole

I’ve seen multiple of their antennas online. The emcomm 3 portable recommends horizontal 25’ up while another one suggests 9-12’ horizontally. I’m jus not sure where the height difference comes in

I took their EMCOMM2 down to PR with me. It served me pretty well. If I remember correctly one ARFCOMmer in AZ heard me doing digital from PR. I could also (barely) talk around the island so OK NVIS performance set up as a simple sloper.

I got my new Emcomm III on Monday and took it camping.  Put it up as a sloper from a wooded, shady campsite.  Got GA, KY, France and Luxembourg from upstate NYS w/20 watts cw.  
Not exactly a controlled test, but it worked great for me, I'm happy with it.

One thing I noticed on the web site about the EMCOMM III is that the swr curves don't look quite as good as the EMCOMM II. Maybe there is some other features that I didn't notice vs. the older one. Someone mentioned it appears they made it more weatherproof. That's probably a good thing as long as it doesn't degrade antenna performance. I left mine out in the rain in PR and didn't suffer any ill effects (except the one night where it was raining and I didn't know it and my tuner kept firing off in the middle of a digital transmission). I might not want to leave my II outside year round, though.

Any horizontally polarized simple antenna at a low height above ground will give you a high angle radiation pattern for "NVIS".

I would suggest a simple dipole, fan dipole for multiband, or an off-center fed dipole, rather than some so-called "end fed" contraption.

The only bands you need for "NVIS" are 80m and 40m, as higher frequencies do not exhibit that propagation phenomenon.  60m would also work if you are so inclined to use that band.

Ok, I talked to the guy at chameleon and he suggested the emcomm2 that’s horizontal at 9-12’ off the ground with a counterpoise. He said that the emcomm2 doesn’t come with a counterpoise but they sold 25’ kits separate. My question is (forgot to ask him), with the antenna 9-12’ that only leave around 15’ for it to go under the 60’ antenna. Would that be enough to work or would I need to look for a longer counterpoise?

I looked at Chameleon's website and can't believe people go for that snake oil.

Oh wait, it's "tactical" "emcomm" "NVIS".

For a dipole to have any kind of broadside gain it needs to be up a half wave or higher.
So for 40M it would be 60+' and for 80M you'd need 120+'
Anything lower than that is more of a cloud warmer or NVIS.
From what I've seen most dipoles are between 25 & 40 ft up.
Sure there's folks with towers etc but the most common antenna is the simple dipole strung thru trees or between buildings and hence will exhibit NVIS properties.
I lost a tree in a winter storm and had to remount an 80 antenna..
It went on tent poles up about 8' off the ground.
It worked like a charm from eastern Maine out thru NY and south into the Carolinas with no noticeable skip zones.
The grey line had an affect as the band would shorten up a bit as the sun rose.
I read somewhere you can lay a couple reflectors under the antenna ~5% longer but I've never tried it.

Meh. Their EMCOMM II antenna did OK for me. I put a new ~130ft. wire on mine and it did better. I have 4 counterpoise lines for it that I didn't use in PR but did when I got back home. Not sure it made that much difference, though. Whenever I've used mine, it was set up as a sloper where the balun was near the ground and the top was 25-35ft. up. My other EFHW that I'm using now has the balun about 6-8 ft off the ground, a vertical run up to about 25ft. then nearly horizontal up to about 30ft. Works really great on 40m, some of the other bands, not so much.

The nice thing about the EMCOMM II and other EFHW wire antennas are they are easy to keep in a small pouch in a go-bag that you can set up and deploy in a reasonable amount of time using either trees or a mast. All antennas have their strengths and weaknesses and people's choice of antenna is often dictated by their location and discretionary funds availability.

What snake oil ?

What claims do they make on their website that you consider to be snake oil ?

I am not trying to argue here, but over the years I have talked to many people who claimed that some given antenna was "snake oil", yet when I looked at what it was and read the information about it, I didn't see any wild claims being made nor did I see anything that I considered to be snake oil.

Someone mentioned using a longer wire with their antenna. I get the impression that a lot of people view antennas as something you buy, install, and basically forget about. Antennas like this Chameleon give you a nice array of components that you can use to build and experiment with. You can add or subtract or modify these components to make a wide variety of antennas for different purposes or to adapt what you have to a given situation. Nothing is cast in stone. The Buddipole is the same type of thing. You have something that has been referred to as a Lego set, or a Swiss Army knife of antennas, or an Erector set.....................you have these components and can assemble them into different configurations. You can add in other stuff you already own, buy or build to make this set of parts do whatever you want.

If someone said that this antenna is hands down better than a four element monobander as far as on the air signal; that would be snake oil. But if someone says this is a quick to deploy, relatively lightweight, man portable antenna that works well for what it is and how it is installed, to me, that is not snake oil.

NVIS will work with an EFHW antenna at 9-12 feet off the ground but like any other low ( relative to wavelength ) horizontal antenna, there will be significant ground losses and performance will be strictly dependent on propagation conditions.

Higher is always better. 1/4 wavelength reduces ground losses significantly but for 80 meters you need 20 meters high and it is still mostly vertical radiation.

I am about to post my experience last week with remote portable operation outside cell and commercial power  in the woods of NW ME on a fishing trip with an MFJ 134 foot EFHW antenna at 20 feet. It works for regional comms. I just have to find the time to type it up.

Like any EFHW or long wire antenna, for best efficiency tge wire should be at least as long as half wave of the lowest band you want to use. For 80m that means 130 feet or so.

Sure you can use a 60 foot wire ( emmcom 2 antenna) on 80m and 160m with a tuner that will tune it, but with a coax fed EFHW you will take a lossy antenna for being low to ground , and add significant losses for being short and losses in the coax for high swr. If you want 80 m get the emmcom 3 which is 130 feet or just get the mfj 134 foot EFHW for half the price if the cammelion, I doubt there is much difference in performance between the 2 brands. It is nothing more than a 49:1 UNUN and a wire.power capability might be different

Snake Oil = Any antenna that claims low SWR from DC to Daylight with no tuner required.

Yeah, I would agree with you.
But, I don't see that being done by Chameleon.

You can build a wire antenna that will present a reasonable (workable) SWR for the harmonically related ham bands: 80, 40, 20, 15, 10. On some bands and at various points in those bands you will have a reasonable SWR. When you get into the WARC bands or 60 meters, you are going to need a tuner. And, if you can't live with a 2:1 SWR you are going to need a tuner. And, Chameleon tells you that you MIGHT need a tuner. Depending on what frequency you are going to be using, you may need a tuner.

I don't have a Chameleon EMCOMM antenna, but I do have one of those MyAntenna.com antennas which I believe is the same basic idea. And I can absolutely use it without a tuner over much of the ham radio HF spectrum (not the same thing as DC to Daylight). It isn't 1:1. And on some bands, for example 17 meters, you have to have a tuner. But it will work on most bands without a tuner.

FWIW: I don't see this tuner thing being a big issue in today's world. Most radios have a built in tuner. These built in tuners may not have a real broad range but most internal tuners are more than good enough to tweak the SWR on this type of antenna. Of course, if you are using an FT-817 or an FT-891 (two rigs that I own), you don't have an internal tuner. But, depending on where you need to operate, you may not need one. I own tuners for both radios (external). The Elecraft tuner for the 817 is about as big as a pack of playing cards. The one I have for the 891 is much larger (about the size of the radio itself); but with the 891 you have 100 watts.