Antennas

And getting your signals out.

Radiating Signals

There is great satisfaction in building stuff. Even more so if it doesn't work at first and you are forced to learn a bit more to get it going. We become smarter with each failure and gain skills each time we attempt to make something for the first time. Antennas give us a great reason to learn.

My first antenna was a simple quarter wave ground plane for 2 meters. 19 1/4 inches of #12 solid copper wire soldered to an SO239 connectore. I cut 2 more pieces of the scrap wire around 39 inches which I threaded through the mounting holes on the SO239, one on each side to make the ground portion. A quick 45 degree bend and an antenna was born. I really got fancy and added some 1" PVC pipe and cap with some holes drilled in to allow the wires to protrude. The coax came up through the PVC. This antenna sat in my closet shack about 10' above the ground and worked like a charm.

It helps that most of the repeaters in the area are thousands of feat higher than where most people live. The Colorado front range is a great place to play ham radio. Denver and most of the towns to the immediate east of the Rockies are between 4000 to 6000 ft and many of the repeater sites are in the 10-12k feet range.

In a way this diminishes my 1/4 wave success a bit, but I'll take it anyway. I still have the antenna in the shop (somewhere) but I haven't used it in quite awhile. Even so, it was the first real project in my ham radio story and was a great place to start.