Curtain Antenna

[riverrat373]

Has anyone here tried to build a small curtain antenna (used by SW broadcasters to transmit)? I know it would have to be scaled back to fit in a back yard but I wonder how well one would work as a broadband antenna?

 

[dlwtrunked]

Has anyone here tried to build a small curtain antenna (used by SW broadcasters to transmit)? I know it would have to be scaled back to fit in a back yard but I wonder how well one would work as a broadband antenna?

You realize scaling antennas will scale the frequencies and these are not broadband antennas. Scaling one of those for some backyards will amount to making them a low band VHF antenna. And since they are not Omni-directional, not sure why one would want a low band VHF antenna like that.

But if one has enough land, doing some calculations: Curtain arrays are usually half-wave dipoles fed in phase mounted 1/4 wavelength in front of a reflector plane at least 1/2 wavelength above ground. So just for a single frequency band, say 10 MHz (wavelength about 30 m), that means a half-wave dipoles of 15 m (about 49 ft), 24 ft in front of a reflector plane, at least 49 feet above the ground-- and just for one band in one direction. Not an easy effort. It is possible to design such array with a bandwidth of 2:1 by paying close non-trivial attention to phasing.

 

[riverrat373]

Just curious. Thanks for the feedback.