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Thank you for that clear explanation. And regarding the distance from ground-plane, I've seen two different specs one 30.5mm and the other 18mm. Thanks again, Mike Let's start out by assuming that the biquads are each 50 ohms (which is something you can ensure by placing them at the correct distance from the reflecting ground-plane). Each 50-ohm biquad is fed through a suitable length of 50-ohm semi-rigid coaxial line. Since the antenna's impedance matches that of the coax, there will be a 1:1 SWR on the coax, and the same 50-ohm impedance will appear at the far end of the coax. In this particular case, the semi-rigid coax will consist of the part which goes through the reflector (supporting the biquad) plus the trimmed 80mm section (which ends up being 77mm after stripping and soldering). There are four such 77mm lengths, which come together as two pairs. At this point, each pair is soldered together, placing two 50-ohm loads in parallel. This creates a 25-ohm load. Now, each 25-ohm connection is soldered to a further length of 50-ohm cable, 58mm long plus a bit for making the connection. The two 58mm sections come together, at the SMA connector. These 58mm sections act as impedance transformers. One of the useful characteristics of a coax which is 1/4 or 3/4 or 5/4 electrical wavelength long, is that it transforms a resistive impedance at one end, to a different resistive impedance at the other... and the geometric mean of these two impedances is equal to the characteristic impedance of the feedline. In this case, if you have a 25-ohm impedance at one end, and the cable has a 50-ohm impedance, then the impedance at the other end of the cable will be 100 ohms. This places two 100-ohm impedances in parallel where they're connected to the SMA jack, resulting in a 50-ohm impedance. In the case of this particular design, the impedance-matching sections (58mm) aren't actually the 3/4 electrical wavelength that one might expect. UT141 has a velocity factor of 0.7, and my slide-rule calculation suggests that they'd be around 65mm long for a true 3/4 electrical wavelength at 2.4 GHz. I would guess that the biquad antennas aren't exactly 50 ohms resistive, and that this impedance is being transformed somewhat by the 77mm sections, and that the length of the final impedance-matching section has been hand-tweaked to 58mm to give the best practical match to 50 ohms (and thus SWR) for the antenna and phasing system. That being the case, I'd probably recommend trying to reproduce the antenna design as-published. If you switch to a cable having a different velocity factor, you may need to do some cutting-and-trying to get the right impedance match. -- Dave Platt AE6EO Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads! |
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