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[KB6NU] Make a 2.4 GHz Yagi with paper clips and popsicle sticks
KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog /////////////////////////////////////////// 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. The post Make a 2.4 GHz Yagi with paper clips and popsicle sticks appeared first on KB6NUs Ham Radio Blog. |
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