"VE8AE Andrew" wrote in message
m...
I want to build a nice small antenna for my boat. I had a J pole in a
PVC tube, but I thought about a vertical dipole of the sleeve type.
Can you make such a beast with the coax and just remove outer
insulation and then pull braid back over the coax until they are both
the same length? I want it for 156.8 MHz so it should be around 1.5 ft
per side. But I have seen an article that says the top portion should
be smaller than the lower braid portion to balance things out
electrically. Can anyone shed some light on this for me? I have tried
it and my analyzer doesn't show it resonant anywhere near that freq.
Hmmmm.
Help please.
Any other good marine antennas that are easy to build would be great
if you have plans or ideas. Thanks folks.
Andrew VE8AE

The outer jacket of coax has some pretty bad properties at these
frequencies. Normally this is not a problem as it is generally just used to
keep water out of the coax. With the sleeve type antenna you are building
you are expecting it to be an RF insulator, a job it was never designed to
do. Ive found these work much better by cutting off the shield where they
fold back and replacing it with a length of Teflon insulted wire. Other
types of insulation may work as well but I have not tried it.