[IW5EDI] Discone Antenna for RTL SDR
 

IW5EDI Simone - Ham-Radio

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Discone Antenna for RTL SDR

Posted: 25 Mar 2016 09:22 AM PDT
http://www.iw5edi.com/ham-radio/2102...antenna-rtlsdr


I have been getting into software defined radio via RTLSDR and found the
stock antennas woeful for reception and picked up a tonne of noise from my
LCD and laptop – though it’s hardly surprising.Â* So to improve the
situation and spend as little as possible I decided to make a discone
antenna.Â*

After some research I happened upon VE3SQB’s site and a neat discone design
program for Windows.

As a compromise between frequency and unwieldyness I settled on 130MHz as
the lower bound.Â* Discones are inherently wideband and I expect the antenna
to be useful for reception in the 60MHz to 1700MHz band the E4000 tuner can
work with.



The ingredients, all from Bunnings a

1m of40mm PVC pipe (my lust for PVC in making antennas is unabated)
2.5mm galvanised tie wire
A 40mm endcap
Some masonite packer
1.5cm brass washers
Stripped solid core ethernet cable


From Middys Electrical Wholesaler I bought:

20m RG6 quadshield coax cable
A bunch of F crimp type connectors (just crimped them with my pliers)
F to TV/Belling-Lee adapter


With no test gear I have no idea what the true parameters of the antenna
are.Â* All I can say that it has massively improved the reception on my
EzyTV dongle for VHF and UHF transmissions in conjuction with placing the
antenna in the far end of my backyard.Â* I can also see distant ADS-B blips
in HDSDR which I will get around to tuning into on GNURadio.

So go forth and make your own discone!

Download the Discone Notes file





Link originally available here http://helix.air.net.au











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