Homemade satcom antenna

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thewrench002

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So i been doing days and days of searching for a diagram and directions on building a military type satcom antenna like the one off black horizon web site..Has anyone else built one like it?..he never finished the article and i have tried to contact him in twitter afew times with no luck..I'm not really interested in buying one off ebay or off any other site.. thanks for any and all info on this style build..
 

thewrench002

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so i went and built one... the hype was not worth it... i should of saved and built a cross yagi or a helical one instead... I'm getting comms on it and herd some milair on it so far..i still have some tinkering with a amp and position of it..
 

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prcguy

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The MT X-wing project antenna works better than a $7,000 military Trivec X-wing within CONUS, I've measured them both. To build your next adventure you will need to make and test a 75 ohm phasing harness different than the X-wing so that it provides a 90deg phase shift between elements or use a commercially made 90deg hybrid coupler and exact lengths of coax to the elements. And you will have to point it at each satellite, where the X-wing is omni directional at the various angles to the satellites. Or I've bought the entire 8 element antennas like shown in your pic on Ebay for under $150.
prcguy


my next adventure will be one of theses...
 

rbm

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Yeah a friend of mine built one a few towns over and all he gets is the pirates ..

By the way..........
That's mostly what's up there.
So, if you spend a lot of money, you may get the pirates a little stronger. ;)

Some clear voice can be heard at times (rarely) and some SSTV repeating the same images over and over and over and over etc.

Rich






X-Wing With Ground Plane

 
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thewrench002

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So .. has anyone played around with changing the length of the elements? .. i know it calls for 10".. i been thinking on 12 or 14"...
 

prcguy

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The MT X-wing was conceived by myself and my good friend and antenna mentor and senior staff scientist, Bart WB6HQK, now a silent key. It was not my first choice but when the original all copper tubing version with two different length elements to create CP and a grounded stub feed was not coming together in time for a magazine article, we had to shift gears and do a more conventional design.

The computer modeling went fast as did the first prototype, but the phasing harness was trial and error taking many hours of bench test time. I know first hand if you change anything it will become a different antenna and performance will be lost.
prcguy

prcguy gave birth to the X-Wing.

I wouldn't mess with perfection. ;)

Rich
 

reconrider8

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Off topic but same study. Could this be used for amateur satellite comms? What would you need to tx to an amateur sat with one if these?
 

ab5r

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Hmmmm? That 20-60 degree range is what the Amsat folks claim is normal operation, especially with handheld antenna contacts.

I doubt that the X wing would have any gain, however. Would that be omni-directional too? Perhaps a preamp would help.

This is primarily a receive only antenna, Ever been used to transmit?
 

VK3RX

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The MT X-wing was conceived by myself and my good friend and antenna mentor and senior staff scientist, Bart WB6HQK,
I wasn't aware of that - outstanding job :)
 

thewrench002

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Ok thanks... I should be testing with afew more amps this week.. the next amp is a 0-45db of gain .. 20db of gain just is not enough..
 
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