At the recent AMSAT-UK Colloquium I bought an Arrow antenna and have been itching to try it out. I've managed to assemble it in a couple of minutes. I set up both the handheld that I won in the AMSAT-UK raffle (Kenwood THD7E) a few years back and the older one (Kenwood TH79E) that I've had since 1996 to the AO-51 frequencies.

The connection from the Arrow is a BNC and the older handheld is a BNC so I'll try and use it with that first.

I set up Predict (see elswhere on this website) and monitored the AO-51 frequency on one of the handhelds and on a medium elevation pass (around 29 deg max) there was just noise on the frequency until just after the satellite had started to drop down when I heard a slight difference in the noise. Moving the handheld around I could just pick out a few words of audio and the beginning of a 'PA'  callsign. That was using the newer THD7E with the standard antenna and the satellite was showing up as 798 miles away from inside the house through the window.

The next pass was around 47 deg max altitude, so I put the Arrow together and connected it to my older handheld. I went out into the backstreet and listened as the satellite came up over the horizon. As it was coming from the south, it wasn't long after that the silence was broken by several calls going on together mostly with Spanish (EA..) calls, then at max altitude the number of stations was staggering with Luxemburg (LX..) and one very strong English (M...) call coming through.

Even after just this one pass, I'll say the Arrow was worth the money and I'll now have to see if I can find a gap in the traffic for my call (G1YYH) to get through.