DIY Antenna Question!

Ahem... Salad bowl reflector. Very vegetarian:

Just shove the USB stick into the plastic pipe. Slide it back and forth for maximum signal. Flat bottom stainless salad bowls available from Ace Hardware.

Difficult to tell. There are two types of rubber ducky antennas. The short 1/2 wave variety, and the same antenna with a 1/4 wave decoupling sleeve. The top part is a 1/4 wave driven element, with a

1/4 coaxial sleeve forming a "coaxial sleeve" antenna and are the same for both types. This is the short one:

The longer one has an additional brass sleeve at prevent the coax cable from radiating. Sorry no photo, as I haven't destroyed one yet. The decoupling sleeve won't benifit much from an extra ground plane. The shorter one probably will. However, the effect won't be huge in terms of increasing the gain. All it does it prevent some of the signal from radiating in odd and unwanted directions.

Methinks you would do better to abandon the rubber ducky, and build an antenna that has some gain, such as a patch, panel, biquad, dish, yagi, corner reflector, etc. I'm a big fan of the biquad mostly because they're very easy to build (if you can solder). My favorite instructions:

Methinks you are a genius!

BiQuad here i come!

Thanks!

Wouldn't a ez-12 or EZ-F work well too? No extra connectors to buy?

It would be interesting to see a comparision between the reflector and a bi-quad.

Steve

About the same gain and beamwidth. Small diameter antennas (i.e. less than 2 wavelengths across) generally have the same capture area and therefore the same gain. It could be a corner reflector, dish, patch, biquad, or dipole array, it will have about 7-10dBi gain. The shapes have a much bigger effect on higher gain antennas.

So a quick question, now that I have this built, what is the best way to use it... by this I mean, the antenna has to point at the source, so how to I keep it vertical? The thought was to get two rubber coated metal clips to form a tripod type stand.

make sense?

ideas?

thanks!

Ummm.... plug, point, adjust, and play. Monitor the signal levels on your computer or use Netstumbler. Position the antenna for maximum signal.

Methinks you'll need something more solid than that. The coax is rather stiff. A real camera tripod will work. I stuffed a test antenna into an electrical box:

which caused it to detune somewhat lower in frequency. Others ended up inside kitchen plastic food storage boxes. The one on my bench is held in place by two window shelf "L" brackets. The one I installed on a neighbors roof is inside a glass bowl, with the coax cable shoved through a hole drilled into a 2x6 piece of scrap wood. I built an array inside a glass baking dish. User RTV for water proofing if mounted outside. Lots of photos on the web. The basic idea is to NOT put anything metallic in front of the antenna.

I like to make dollars, not cents.

Ideas are easy. Getting someone to fund them is more difficult.