Homemade Wide Band Antenna

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W3AWF

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I am trying to build a wide band receiver antenna but am coming up short on ideas and designs so I figured that I would open it up to the forum here and see what all you guys have done in the past.

I live in an area where the next county over which is 5 miles west of me is on low band, and the county that I live in and work in is on 800MHZ. There is many frequencies both Low band and 800 that I would like to listen to other than just county Fire and EMS. I am looking to build a wide band receive antenna that I can use for most of the spectrum. What design would be most optimal for this application?
 

jonwienke

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Probably a discone, or a multiband fan dipole similar to the ST-2.

You may want to consider building two antennas, one for low band and VHF, and the other for UHF and above, and combine their outputs with a duplexer to have a single feedline to the scanner.

If you want to build a wideband directional antenna, a log-periodic dipole array would probably be your best bet.
 

jackj

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The log-periodic would give you gain while the disk-cone is unity gain at best. I have been using a disk-cone for over 20 yrs and it works great for me.

BTW, a log-periodic is not a dipole. It has more than one element active on almost all frequencies it covers. It is directional so it may not be the best choice for you.
 

mmckenna

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I'd agree with Jon on the two antenna approach.

It's difficult to force good low band coverage out of a discone. It can be done, but you can do better.

A 1/4 wave low band antenna is pretty easy to make, you can even start off with an old CB antenna as a starting point. You might actually be surprised the DX you can pull in with a good low band antenna.
 

jonwienke

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BTW, a log-periodic is not a dipole. It has more than one element active on almost all frequencies it covers. It is directional so it may not be the best choice for you.

BTW, you're wrong, it's a log-periodic DIPOLE ARRAY (hence the name log-periodic dipole array), and consists of an array of interconnected dipole antennas:
Log Periodic Dipole Array Antenna

And I clearly specified that it is a directional antenna. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing depends on what the OP wants to do.
 
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