As you may or may not be aware I am building a ground plane antenna for 2-metres, which could potentially work with 70cm as well, today I visited a certain DIY store for some parts, these were a drill bit to make a hole for the SO239, 2 2 metre lengths of waste pipe, a T section (compression fit for ease of assembly/disassembly and has a handy curve so as to run the coax round it), 2 couplers (also compression fit for same reason) and a black end cap as well as some extra Sugru for waterproofing.
The first job was to bore the hole into the end cap, this went well until the hole was made and the hole bit injured my hand, as I was using the bit with a ratchet screwdriver handle and had my hand on the other side of the end cap, holes were made for the bolts, then the screws passed through, a fiddly job, then the connector placed on the end cap, the 4 groundplane radials have been reattached, the whole lot then waterproofed with Sugru, and the end cap sealed with the same on a cut off piece of one of the two lengths of pipe, the other end of this had the T piece fitted with the coax threaded through and connected to the antenna before it was all sealed, helped by pliers as there is little to no room.
The part built antenna was then tested with 10 watts from my Leixen VV898, on 2-metres the needle barely moved for SWR, 70cm showed similar results suggesting this antenna could be used on 70cm as I alluded to above, how this will work outdoors with 25 watts from my QYT KT8900D remains to be seen, tomorrow I will get the Comet CTC-50M jumper in place, and the antenna itself should be ready to go on air tomorrow or Monday.
73 de 2E0EIJ
No comments:
Post a Comment
Due to past abuse and the ongoing issues that left me little choice to reduce time on twitter and IRC I have taken the decision to keep comments disabled indefinitely, apologies for this
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.