Looking for a Decent Homemade Scanner Antenna

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Ravenkeeper

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My house acts like a Faraday cage, I'm lucky to get one bar of cell service inside. I'm looking for a way to set my scanner up at home, and receive a good amount of signals, until I finally get my discone antenna. I may even leave it up after the antenna gets here, for local chatter.

Any suggestions for low cost, sudo-temperary antenna?
 

vagrant

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Look for instructions on making a VHF/UHF Slim Jim antenna. You can make one that rolls up, or shove it up into some PVC tubing and put it outside with a run of decent LMR-400 coax and get it above your roofline. You'll need that coax later with the discone. You could use RG6 75 Ohm coaxial cable if money is tight right now. Up to you.
 

popnokick

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I have one of these in my attic and it is very wide banded ... meaning receives a very wide range of frequencies. I recently experimented by changing from the Off-Center Fed Dipole to a J-pole "Slim Jim" antenna because I wanted better performance in the 2M and 70cm ham bands. The J-pole worked exactly the same as the OCFD in the ham bands.... but I lost about half of what I was hearing on the rest of the frequencies that were covered by the OCFD. The J-pole was just too narrow a receive range for general scanning. I switched back to my OCFD and am hearing everything again. Actually, slightly more I think.... getting more military air reception now than I did before. Might be because I removed the FM broadcast filter from the setup.... turns out I didn't need it.
 
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vagrant

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Agreed - The OCFD is easy to build with parts one may already have. It works well enough too.
 

ladn

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I have one of these in my attic and it is very wide banded ... meaning receives a very wide range of frequencies.
Fully agree with @popnokick and @vagrant .

I have several of these. One made from aluminum tubing in the rafters of my garage, and another made from wire hanging on the wall in my office. They work well for what I monitor and were easy and economical to build.
 
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