Glomex, a dynamic company constantly engaged in the research and development of products aimed at making life onboard safer and more comfortable, presents Polaris – a new directive antenna for all your communication and entertainment needs.

This new antenna offers the most highly advanced electric and electronic characteristics available and what’s more it can be installed simply as an upgrade to your current system – the supports are the same as those used by Glomex over the last 20 years for receiving analogical terrestrial; the amplifier is even the same shape, but its functioning ability is far superior. It is important to note that Polaris comes with two marine amplifiers – one internal and one external, both having elevated noise dampening characteristics, or rather the capacity to reduce interference from other electromagnetic sources thereby improving sound quality.

Moreover, the level of signal amplification is such that it can be installed in systems where you don’t want to replace the preinstalled coaxial cable, in so far as it makes up for any insertion loss due to the age of the existing coaxial cable. This new model has some very interesting and innovative technical characteristics, one of which is the presence ofbypasses for both the amplifiers: coaxial relays which make it possible to obtain optimal reception signal management under any condition.

This exclusive bypass solution, found only on Glomex marine antennas, is not only unique but is the only solution available today for the problem of receiver saturation by a too strong signal, a situation that makes TV viewing impossible. In fact, this problem of overly strong signals is encountered in proximity to TV repeaters or excessive amplification sources. Another characteristic of the bypass is to dampen interference from onboard appliances or from inferior quality power sources: these types of interference normally affect the video portion of digital terrestrial signals creating a disturbance that can go from picture haze to total blackout.

The combination of a particularly sensitive directive receiver, two amplifiers and bypasses makes Polaris the ideal antenna for marine crafts. In fact, this type of necessarily mobile craft is subject to considerable field variation and therefore an antenna system that can handle and adapt itself to the received signal intensity is the only winning solution. Polaris is able to receive both horizontally and vertically polarized signals and is therefore the ideal antenna for both analogical and digital reception. Now add to this the extra efficacy provided by an antenna element constructed according to the log-periodic principle – or rather, a directive element having a 60° lobe within which you obtain maximum gain, that in this particular case for boat is 6dB (UHF), able to receive even if positioned to different angles.

For example, at a 200° incidence angle of the signal received by the aerial element, the gain is 0 dB – this means that whenever you are near the coast and signal intensity is strong, you can still watch for boat TV without having to orient the antenna. It is also important to remember that signals broadcast with vertical polarization do not require any antenna orientation as the receiver element is omnidirectional. In the event that the received signal is too intense and the electromagnetic energy that our antenna picks up tends to saturate the system causing less that perfect viewing, it is possible to exclude the amplifiers and thanks to the bypass the signal reaches the receiver exactly as it is picked up by the antenna. Practically speaking, the addition of these elements has made it possible to solve the problem of saturation, a situation that all too often occurs in certain areas and one that cannot be remedied by adjusting the amplifier’s potentiometer. In fact, on all antennas currently on the market if you exclude the amplifier, you block the signal: you keep it from reaching the receiver.

Glomex, always aware of the need to develop solutions able to resolve any type of problem that can compromise optimal TV signal reception onboard has come up with this apparently simple, but particularly effective system – one that makes the Polaris antenna the perfect solution, whether the signal is too weak or overly strong as happens for example in proximity to TV transmitters. Obviously, the development of the Polaris antenna is the result of the intense and dedicated research the company constantly carries out in these fields. In fact, the most advanced technical solutions are found in the research area that Glomex dedicates to marine satellite antenna, where the technical problems to be solved are both numerous and complex.

Glomex offers a wide range of satellite antennas and among those available on the market today it is the one company that is best able to guarantee both perfect viewing and structural reliability at a price in line with the value of the benefits delivered. Furthermore, Polaris is the only antenna currently marketed that can assure high quality digital terrestrial viewing even when navigational far off the coast – something that is simply not possible with sector switched or omnidirectional type antennas. The reason for this lies mainly in the elevated gain that a directive antenna is able to express, in our case 6 dB in MARINE CB, while with an omnidirectional antenna the gain is 0. Consider the fact that based on these elements – which are purely technical and cannot be altered by any sort of alchemy – the ratio between one type of antenna and the other in terms of reception is 3 to 1. Moreover, the Polaris antenna system is not only particularly sensitive but has been designed to be extremely selective and this means that it picks up only those signals necessary to guarantee optimal TV viewing, ignoring spurious signals and those reflected by buildings or onboard obstacles, such as sail boat masts, etc. There are also some very compact antenna available on the market today and you would expect them to be little sailboat short of miraculous, but obviously in this extremely technical field you don’t need a miracle to develop a good product – what is truly needed is applied research that makes it possible to reach avant-garde technical solutions that must comply with the laws of physics and radio-technology.

Glomex has carried out numerous tests on other companies’ products: exactly on those that are touted to be ‘miraculous’. Based on this current experimentation and comparison phase regarding a wide variety of competitor products available on the market, Glomex has reached an important conclusion. Results demonstrate that the Polaris antenna has no rivals in terms of quality and/or performance. The differences, measured and evaluated by precise technical instruments, are enormous; above all in those situations of weak signal strength, as is often the case at sea. But even when in port, the differences are noteworthy: other antennas simply cannot discriminate between good signals and signals that are no more than noise. Even sector switched antennas, which in any case are and remain 0 dB, pick up at least three times fewer signals than Polaris, even when a specific receiving sector is selected.