Revised product review Hills Ultimax

The Hills Ultimax UHF Phased Array has been around for a long time, despite being a well built high gain antenna it had a few shortcomings which steered me to other choices.
Recently the Rep for Hills passed the new version of the Ultimax to me via the great team at Go Electrical at Kincumber to see what i thought of it.

Previous expectations of the Ultimax mean't it should be heavy, catch the wind, but well built.
It seems someone at the design team has had a bit of a rethink about that and redesigned the back screen section.

Previously the back screen was made up of C section strips of aluminium, combine that with a heavy antenna and the back strips catching the wind, you have essentially a sail on your roof.
The amount of times I've found an Ultimax that had fatigued and snapped at it's mount or in the case of an install previously done by a "home handyman" the entire assembly ripped clean off the roof in strong winds due to the back screen section being a major drag that I always preferred to supply and fit Alcad AP369's. Then in October 2015 they were NLA so my only choice for a quality antenna at a fair price was the Matchmaster WISI.

I had no issues or drawbacks with the Alcad and was really unhappy when suppliers stopped importing them, The WISI from Matchmaster although being the highest gain phased array on the market has got some annoying drawbacks incuding the price.

The guy's at Hill's have changed the back screen of the Ultimax now to aluminum tubes with sealed off ends which are swaged as they enter the main backbone of the antenna. No more wind drag.
I did expect to see plastic strips along the ends of the back screen like just about every other brand and model phased array but the Ultimax just has the sealed tubes which not only makes the antenna look unfinished/incomplete but I expect to encounter bird's impaled on the tubes like I've seen happen to Log Periodical antenna's.
Not a fun thing to have to deal with but hey, I'll still be better off than the bird.

The front section of the Ultimax is unchanged from the tried and tested design and my confidence in this part of the antenna lasting 15-20 years is no issue.
The sealed balun has recieved a very belated update to include an LTE filter whereas other manufacturers had introduced inbuilt LTE filters mid 2015, Hills has waited untill now to include it in the Ultimax.
Here's where I fail to see the point of bothering though, the LTE filters in WISI's, economy Matchmaster panels and other brands, are pretty much pointless.
They knock out at best 5 dB of LTE. When on the Central Coast you have 110 dB of LTE coming in, what's 5 dB reduction going to achieve?
The masthead amplifiers begin to overload when more than 77 dB of signal is hitting the input stages and at best the few masthead amps with inbuilt LTE filters knock out 20db, you still end up needing to fit a LTE filter between the antenna and the masthead.

Now consider the Central Coast isn't the easiest area to get reliable reception, you have only 80 dB maximum signal output from the transmitters, mountain ranges nearly always in the direction of the transmitter and or a belt of tree canopies blocking signal to the point sometimes it's a big struggle to get the much needed minimum 50-55 dB in some areas.

What if the best signal you can get is just above the minimum 50 dB 14 dB MER with no errors on a still day and ideal conditions and you're fighting to knock out 100 dB of LTE, the insertion loss of the seperate filter is between 3-10 dB meaning you now have reception for a client that will definately drop out in windy conditions. Or do I still choose the WISI over the Ultimax as it's 9 times out of 10 will pull 3 db more signal than an Ultimax.

How about at least 20 db LTE filtration in the balun? That would be at least useful, a perfect balun to me would be a 60 db cut to negate needing a Kingray or Lacey's FAE60 thus removing the insertion loss dilemma.
On my home using the old design Ultimax I have 57.2 db of clean signal from the Bouddi transmitter, unfortunately I have over 110 db of LTE thanks to the mobile phone transmitters on the roof of the local high rise hotel resort and also the adjacent mountain.
I have had to use two 60 db filters and a masthead with an inbuilt filter to have stable reception as I still had LTE re-introduce itself in the output stages of the masthead which is fairly common in most makes and model mastheads and compounded if unlike me you have older cabling that's not quadshielded which will also pickup and re-introduce LTE.
Signal survey tests between the old and new versions of the Ultimax showed no discernible difference in outright levels, MER or error rate on a Promax TV explorer 5 spectrum analyser so I can safely say the new model performs just as well as the old.
As far as LTE is concerned, i couldn't tell any difference between the two which has made my point, why bother putting in a 5 db filter and attaching a pretty little sticker on the balun advertising the LTE filter if it's too small a cut to serve any real use?

To be fair, it's main competitor the WISI, also has a LTE filter that in reality achieves next to nothing too.

In the end, to fit with my product selection needs and to maintain a business model of "The right job for a fair price" I would look to stocking the Hills Ultimax over the WISI as it has less drawbacks in it's design vs price in the "Quality" antenna catagory.
It still doesn't hold a candle to the Alcad AP369 but being nostalgic about a NLA product that was half the price and had no design flaws and the only substitute in that price bracket are the Chinese made rubbish, The Hills Ultimax is clearly the Antenna to use if you want an install to last 10-20 years at a fair price.