Other Hobbys
- Details
- Hits: 1955
- Details
- Hits: 2074
This is a 8 element collinear antenna made from LMR 400 coax. The 1st and last elements are 1/4 wave length while the others are 1/2 wave length with velocity factor. I put it inside a 3/4" PVC pipe. The results are in the images below, I am very satisfied with the results. I built this antenna to feed data to Flightaware using a Raspberry Pi and a Flightaware dongle. You can see my results in real time here.
{gallery}/Collinear_Antenna{/gallery}
- Details
- Hits: 3227
I made this antenna on a rainy Sunday afternoon with expectations it wasn't going to work. I used an online calculator some 14g solid copper wire and a piece of PVC pipe. Drilled the holes for the elements with the right spacing for each, guesstimated really on how far the insert them to there was somewhat equal lengths on each side, secured the with hot glue. I split a piece of coax and soldered it to driven element and done! It took me less than an hour to build it. I couldn't test it right then so I waited till the following weekend. When I got around to testing it I was VERY surprised! The signals I was receiving were really strong and sounded good and clear.
The reason for building this antenna was for listing to satcom pirates and just because. There are a lot of pirates out there, there is one guy that just send SSTV images over and over again. Again I'm new to this type of communications so I don't know for sure which satellites I am hearing. There are 2 directions I point to receive different signals and different voices east southeast & southwest. Southwest sounds more like Brazilian voices and east southeast sounds like Spanish. I think the southwest bird is FLTSATCOM 7 (USA 7) @ 100°W and the east southeast bird is FLTSATCOM 8 (USA 20) @ 54°W. Each satellite has many channels. If you want to know more, good luck. I have found there is not much info about these and some info contradicts itself. But anyways its interesting to learn about. If your reading this and can help me out with what frequency = channels and what bird they belong to, send me an email from the contact page or find me on Twitter. Below are just few pictures and samples of the type of signals I receive.
{gallery}Satcom_Antenna{/gallery}
- Details
- Hits: 5429
I Built this antenna for NOAA weather APT satellites. At the time of making this there are 3 in orbit; NOAA 15, NOAA 18, & NOAA 19. It didn't turn out, looks wise, as well as others I had seen online but when I checked the SWR it was dead on 1:1 at 137.000MHz. At the time I was very new to WX satellite reception. So I installed it on my tower at about 45ft and waited for the first flyby on a NOAA satellite, the results were not good! So I took it back down and stored it away not giving it much thought. I lost a bit of interest in it for while but when I did want to try and receive an image I would just use my 2m/440 omni atop my tower, which out it worked much better than the QFH antenna. Well after about year and half I got the antenna back out and studied over it again. Come to find out at the top where the coax connects to each leg there was a short, didn't notice that before, don't know if that was even the issue with it the first time. So I have fixed that issue and have read up some more on these types of antennas. Now I think I have it ready, I'm just waiting to put it back up. This time a plan on leaving it up for a while and not giving up on the first bad pass. If you check out my weather satellite page, all those pictures are received using my 2m/44 omni.
Making the antenna wasn't to bad, it would have been easier it I had the right parts. I'm not going to explain have to make one, just google search for it. I used 3/8" copper pipe but I didnt have any 3/8" 90deg elbows. So I used the next size up and just used a lot of solder to fill in the gaps to make the connection. It took a friend and I about 2 hours to make it. Below is the link to the online calculator I used to build mine also a few pictures of the construction process.
{gallery}QFH_Antenna{/gallery}
- Details
- Hits: 1621
{gallery}photography/moon{/gallery}