Anyone done much homebrewing of scanner antennas?
My general go to antenna is a discone, which seems to work well across everything I listen to. But I have tried some home brew solutions over the past few years, and a few actually worked.
850mhz collinear: I made a few of these, and I have to say I wasn’t terrible excited about the results. Probably a flaw in my design or implementation, but I didn’t get a noticeable improvement over the diacone. I used 75ohm coax, which I usually do for scanner antennas, maybe that didn’t help. If I could make this antenna work, it’s one of few designs I could get away with putting outdoors and I’d have one in a fiberglass tube mounted right on my gable.
Copper jpole/ turned into slim Jim: I have no idea if it was necessary to use the matching features of a jpole for an antenna that will never transmit, but this one works way better than the discone at the freqs it was designed for - milair. I leave a BCT15X connected to it all the time. It works rather decently outside that also. Great on VHF low and on uhf it gives up very little to the discone. I’m still amazed at the traffic I hear through this setup. Still, I’ve long been skeptical that it does any better than a similarly tuned ground plane would do.
850mhz yagi: this one was fun, and definitely helps pick up some distant public service repeaters. I can’t remember how many elements I used without crawling in the attic, but probably 8 or so. Probably could have bought one cheaper after I bought all the aluminum - story of my life.
Anyone else have designs to share?
My general go to antenna is a discone, which seems to work well across everything I listen to. But I have tried some home brew solutions over the past few years, and a few actually worked.
850mhz collinear: I made a few of these, and I have to say I wasn’t terrible excited about the results. Probably a flaw in my design or implementation, but I didn’t get a noticeable improvement over the diacone. I used 75ohm coax, which I usually do for scanner antennas, maybe that didn’t help. If I could make this antenna work, it’s one of few designs I could get away with putting outdoors and I’d have one in a fiberglass tube mounted right on my gable.
Copper jpole/ turned into slim Jim: I have no idea if it was necessary to use the matching features of a jpole for an antenna that will never transmit, but this one works way better than the discone at the freqs it was designed for - milair. I leave a BCT15X connected to it all the time. It works rather decently outside that also. Great on VHF low and on uhf it gives up very little to the discone. I’m still amazed at the traffic I hear through this setup. Still, I’ve long been skeptical that it does any better than a similarly tuned ground plane would do.
850mhz yagi: this one was fun, and definitely helps pick up some distant public service repeaters. I can’t remember how many elements I used without crawling in the attic, but probably 8 or so. Probably could have bought one cheaper after I bought all the aluminum - story of my life.
Anyone else have designs to share?
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