24 Nov 2012

More big wheels and turnstiles

When looking around for possible homebrew designs I saw an article that appeared in QST back in 2008.  Looking at this approach I am not convinced it is easier than the conventional big wheel design though. See http://radio-amador.net/pipermail/cluster/attachments/20100107/a2f81f3e/AntenaHPOD.pdf

A design for a 70cm big wheel, designed to be used with a beacon, is available at http://www.qsl.net/dl4mea/antennas/bigw.htm .

The turnstile design on the EA4EOZ website
Another simple approach to a VHF or UHF omni-directional horizontally polarised antenna is the simple turnstile (a pair of phased cross dipoles that produce an almost 360 degree clean radiation pattern with about 0.9dBd loss only). These can be stacked to produce gain, as with the big wheel.

Overall, the conventional big wheel design is my favoured approach for 2m and 70cm. Whether I make my own or buy a Wimo version remains to be seen.

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