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Tower Antennas
- Thread starter zkorner
- Start date
That's a cell tower
CanesFan95
Active Member
I've always wondered how antenna elements can be flat like that. I thought they're usually round.
chrismol1
P25 TruCking!
- Joined
- Mar 15, 2008
- Messages
- 1,181
There's some funny looking stuff behind the cover
G7RUX
Member
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2021
- Messages
- 408
Inside the casing (“radome”) the actual antenna parts are usually fabricated from pressed metal, often nickel plated steel, or aluminium. There are lots of different designs but a TV antenna called the “grid” antenna gives a decent idea of the basic design of the typical cellular panel.
prcguy
Member
Antenna radiating parts are rarely steel and never nickel plated if its for repeater or full duplex use due to IMD problems with nickel plating. Antenna element material under the radome is usually aluminum copper or brass. The flat panels are either large flat rectangular reflectors with multiple antenna elements out in front of the reflector covered with a radome or sometimes directional thin circuit board patch antennas with multiple combined to form a higher gain array.
nd5y
Member
Scroll all the way down for more pics.
Ever wonder what's inside one of those big cellular "panel" antennas?
Lots of little antennas This single-pole/single-band antenna is nowhere near the beasts being used for NV, but the concept remains mostly the same. In the multi-pole/multi-band antennas, the elements are at 90-degree angles to each other, which allows for port-to-port isolation, there are some la...
s4gru.com
G7RUX
Member
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2021
- Messages
- 408
That is not correct. Several current manufacturers produce cellular BTS antennas using nickel flashed steel in structural radiating elements, especially where they are intended for hot service areas. Nickel is indeed problematic regarding PIM where moisture is involved but stabilised, sealed elements largely avoid this by being nichrome coated (nickel chromium alloy) and at very very thin surface coatings. You are correct that many elements are aluminium alloys for the majority of designs but few are copper (except beryllium copper where needed.)
Various designs are used; grid, bowtie and patch are common with phased Vivaldi and Corneans being popular nowadays, especially as they can be made using cheap PC methods. I have eight or nine current designs in service at the moment with two more (phased arrays of crossed Vivaldi slots) going through acceptance testing in the coming month or so. One advantage of the patch types is they can be bi-polarisation with one element, fed from sides in quadrature Although they are fairly narrow band compared to some of the more interesting designs.
Last edited:
prcguy
Member
So any nickel is flashed with something to avoid PIM meaning bare nickel by itself is not the ideal plating for radiating antenna elements. Many antennas (designed by us Yanks) like stacked vertical colinear arrays I've taken apart are copper tubing elements and not beryllium, simply copper plumbing bits. Some companies I've seen that use all bare copper elements within a radome are Phelps Dodge, Celwave, Telewave, Antenna Specialists, Laird and others.
A phased array of Vivaldi slots sounds interesting but they have such wide BW I can imagine keeping the radiation pattern under control over a wide frequency range would be a major hurdle.
One of the most interesting designs I've seen was a phased array consisting of resonant size (length and dia) tubing with the back half the tubing inside a resonant cavity and a phased array has lots of tubes sticking out of what looks like a shallow box. You excite the array with waveguide into the box or a radiating probe inside the box. A single element has more gain than a dipole so a phased array of these is smaller than most any other design for the same amount of gain. The inventor was just implementing a method of varying the pattern when I saw the design.
I met the inventor and tested his designs as my company was interested in using his patents but in the end we went another direction. I was just looking for the inventors business card but can't find it so I don't know the name or location of the company at the moment. But looked like a real game changer about 15yrs ago when it was first invented.
A phased array of Vivaldi slots sounds interesting but they have such wide BW I can imagine keeping the radiation pattern under control over a wide frequency range would be a major hurdle.
One of the most interesting designs I've seen was a phased array consisting of resonant size (length and dia) tubing with the back half the tubing inside a resonant cavity and a phased array has lots of tubes sticking out of what looks like a shallow box. You excite the array with waveguide into the box or a radiating probe inside the box. A single element has more gain than a dipole so a phased array of these is smaller than most any other design for the same amount of gain. The inventor was just implementing a method of varying the pattern when I saw the design.
I met the inventor and tested his designs as my company was interested in using his patents but in the end we went another direction. I was just looking for the inventors business card but can't find it so I don't know the name or location of the company at the moment. But looked like a real game changer about 15yrs ago when it was first invented.
