This week, I had a little time and wanted to install a better UHF Antenna and an antenna for HF. Here in Florida, weather does not like to cooperate and most of the week has been misting and cold (at least cold for a Floridian). Fortunately, the weather did allow me to get the UHF antenna in place.
The main antenna I have used with the SDR is the telescoping antenna that came with the Ham It Up bundle. It works well for portable applications; but, in the shack, I wanted something capable of being mounted higher and a better feed line.
A SMA Male to SO-239 Female adapter is used to make the connection to standard 50 Ohm coax. SO-239 and PL-259 are more commonly used on antennas and easier to terminate.
The feed line used for this antenna is Belden 8268. This is a type of RG-214 50 Ohm coax. It is very flexible for its size and easy to work with.
The antenna used for the SDR was removed from a fire alarm wireless communicator. The frequency was changed to 146 MHz. This just required a little trim of the radiator. The mount that is being used is a satellite dish mount. The bottom of the antenna is about 18′ above the ground.
The new antenna works great. I was able to test it while a local simplex net was going on and it preformed well for the height that it is mounted. The antenna also received railroad and aviation very well. In the next post, we will install an HF antenna and the Ham It Up upconverter.
Links
https://km4nmp.com/2019/12/21/using-a-sdr-with-the-raspberry-pi-4b/
https://km4nmp.com/2019/11/02/the-raspberry-pi-4/
Click to access 8268_techdata.pdf
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