The AC Marine Celmar0-1 is just a basic 1m sailboat whip VHF antenna made of stainless steel. These types of antenna are perfectly fine for AIS receiving and are not very expensive. They will get you the guaranteed 30nm range every day and up to 60nm or over on good days. Dont expect any improvement in range though between similar ones from any of the reputable manufacturers offerings, these are quite simple antennas. The difference will be in the quality of materials used instead and therefore longevity. I have compared this antenna with similar one from shakespeare and the performance was perhaps identical.
The AC Marine is seen to have a stainless steel housing and it appears to be a quality manufacture. The antenna has a range of 6MHz namely from 156-162.5 Mhz. It has a gain of 0 dBd or 3 Marine dB.
One thing I dont like is that the top is plastic. Hopefully they used some plastic which does not deteriorate in the hot sun. We will be testing that well in the summer here in Greece. The bottom has a typical SO-239 jack to attach the cable to.
One of the reasons that I suggest to purchase this antenna for AIS receiving is because some suppliers offer it together with a 15m cable with the connectors attached ready for you to use immediately without searching or soldering etc.
We can see the cable is terminated with a BNC connector for connecting to the AIS Receiver. Then on the other side it is terminated with an odd connector I am not familiar with which screws into a PL239 connector so you can connect it immediately to the SO239 connector of the antenna. It will be important to cover the connectors of the cable at the antenna end with at least electrical tape or better thermally activating tape in order to make sure that rain does not get inside the connectors.
The cable supplied is RG58C/U 50 Ohm cable. For the Smart Radio AIS receivers we must use a 50 Ohm antenna so we must use also 50 Ohm cable to match the antenna. This is very important. This cable is a nice size 0.5cm diameter and is not very rigid so it will be nice to work with. Unfortunately you can only use this cable for 15m and below lengths. If you need more you can go up to and a little over 30m with thicker and better quality RG213/U cable which is not so easy to work with as it is more rigid.
The antenna is supplied with a mounting bracket which is probably not going to be very useful on it's own for most people as they will want to mount the antenna on a pipe, like we do with television antennas. Unfortunately this is a quite typical bracket for sailboat antennas.
