@ki4its wrote:
Got a wild hair yesterday and decided to go out to the shop and look for materials to attempt a Helix antenna.
fired up the calculator and started building. Here is what I came up with real quick.
As you can see it is not very pretty.
I didnt have the SMA bulkhead connector that I wanted to use so I used the only thing I had. an SO-239 with the mating PL-259 coming out of the back of the antenna. Had 3 foot of junk coax on hand and had to use that as well. So all in all there are 4 adapters in line between the LNA and the antenna. And crappy coax. Disconnected the Panel antenna that comes with the kit and put this one inline. It has a beamwidth of about 24 degrees so its a bit more precise of an aiming experiment than the fantastic antenna that comes with the DIY kit. Having said that, I did not spend a lot of time aiming precisely. plugged it in and aimed it in the general direction of the satellite. Here are the results from the OUTERNET UI.
Side note: the refresh on the UI lagged a bit so it was hard to get a good idea of when I was actually pointed in an optimal direction but it worked good enough.
I will connect the antenna to my analyzer a bit later and do some fine tuning. I will also plug it into SDR# . I will post results a bit later..
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