Posted on Saturday, May 21, 2011 • Category: Antennas
Recently the RASON technical committee was hard at work at the repeater site repairing our 2 meter repeater antenna. One of the members commented to me that I should write an article about collinear arrays so that we could all build our own. While it is not always feasible to home-brew a commercial quality antenna designed to take hurricane force winds, it is very feasible to built a collinear antenna for average use. This article describes a collinear antenna made from very inexpensive RG58/U coaxial cable and encased in PVC pipe.
Before we start building we need to cover some ground about the characteristics of coaxial cable. First remember that there is something called the velocity factor for coaxial cable. For RG58/U coax it is typically .66. This means that when we calculate the length of ½ wavelength in free space we need to adjust its size by multiplying it by the velocity factory. Simply put, RF slows down by the velocity factor when traveling through coaxial cable. All that aside now, lets calculate the ½ wavelength of RG58/U coaxial cable with a frequency of 444 Megahertz.
Build Accurate LC Meter and start making your own coils and inductors. This LC Meter allows to measure incredibly small inductances making it perfect tool for making all types of RF coils. LC Meter can measure inductances starting from 10nH - 1000nH, 1uH - 1000uH, 1mH - 100mH and capacitances from 0.1pF up to 900nF. The circuit includes an auto ranging and reset function to make sure the readings are as accurate as possible ... [more]
