KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

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Make a 2.4 GHz Yagi with paper clips and popsicle sticks

Posted: 29 Mar 2017 11:18 AM PDT
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/kb6nu...m_medium=email


Yesterday, a Tweet appeared in my feed, directing me to a Sparkfun blog
post describing how to use popsicle sticks and paper clips toÂ*makeÂ*a 2.4
GHz WiFi Yagi antenna. I love this project so much that I thought Id give
it some publicity here.



As you can see, its really more than a Yagi antenna, though. Its more like
a 2.4 GHz field strength meter. The board on the antenna beam is aÂ*SparkFun
ESP8266 Thing, which includes anÂ*Arduino-compatible microcontrollerÂ*and a
WiFi interface. The microcontroller is running a sketch (thats what the
Arduino folks call a program) that reads the received signal strength from
the WiFi chip on the board and displays that value on the little LED
display.

Using some antenna simulation software, the author calculated a gain of 10
dBi for his little Yagi, and in practice, it yielded a gain of about 6 dB
over the onboardÂ*PCB antenna. Thats pretty good considering that the PCB
antenna probably had some amount of gain and there was probably some loss
in the cable. And, as the author pointed out, he made no attempt to match
the antennas impedance.

One improvement Id suggest using a dowel or maybe a square stick of wood
instead of the popsicle sticks. While using popsicle sticks is cute, Im not
sure how sturdy that boom really is.

Finally, I love the authors suggestion of using this device for fox
hunting. These devices would be inexpensive to make, and I think they would
work very nicely, at least in an area that didnt already have a lot of 2.4
GHz WiFi signals.



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