Home-made antennas can greatly improve the performance of AM and FM radios, short-wave receivers, and scanners. If you are a talk-radio fan then experiment with the AM band antennas and you will be able to hear shows from all over the country with surprising clarity. Short-wave receivers are always coping with weak signals and they…
Category: Articles
Here you can find articles I’ve cached, that are no more available in the net or are very rare to be found. Where possible credit will be given to authors.
An Introduction To Amateur Satellite Ground Station Antennas
There are many kinds of satellite antennas that will get you on the birds (some better than others) and allow you to have lots of fun. If you are new to amateur satellites, though, all the options may be confusing, or worse, a disincentive to try the birds. It’s really not that bad. I offer…
Long Loopstick Antenna
Wound on a 3 foot length of PVC pipe, the long loopstick antenna was an experiment to try to improve AM radio reception without using a long wire or ground. It works fairly well and greatly improved reception of a weak station 130 miles away. A longer rod antenna will probably work better if space…
Six Meter Wavelength Band Antennas
The advent of new, affordable MF/HF/VHF radios in the last few months from virtually all the major manufacturers, has spurred a migration by more and more Hams to the Six Meter band. I’m often asked, “What antennas are best for Six Meters?”. Before answering a question like this, I must first ask the Ham what…
AM Antennas
An AM loop antenna is one of the true marvels of electronics. Requiring no power, it takes advantage of the resonant properties of aninductor and a capacitor connected in parallel to receive weak AM stations. The “loop” part of the antenna is the inductor, and thetuning capacitor makes it resonate at a desired frequency.
J-Pole Antennas
About J-POLE ANTENNAS by Mike Walkington, VK1KCK The J-Pole antenna is an omnidirectional antenna that can be used for base, mobile and field day stations. It does not need a ground plane, radials or a complicated matching system. The J-Pole can be cheaply, simply and quickly constructed using a variety of techniques, some of which…
A 50 Ohm Dummy Load
This idea came about after listening to all you Amateurs tuning-up your amplifiers while on-air.It always happens right in the middle of receiving a good SSTV picture! This may give you the idea of building your own (cheap) dummy load and do your tuning through this.You can subsitute the shown value components to handle your…
Some Tips on Sound Card Interfacing to Your Rig
Originally, I set out to simply to record and play back received audio in cases where it was necessary to let other stations hear their own signal as accurately as possible. I soon discovered that there is software out there that also allows SSTV and RTTY via the sound card as well. Most likely there…
Why Are Antennas Built to Look Like They Do?
We come to recognize the proportionate shape and appearance of antennas. If we see a half wavelength dipole we recognize it for the antenna it is. When we see a Ground Plane antenna we know what it is. Its just the same as when we see a Ford automobile next to a Volkswagen we know…
Low Noise Antenna Connection
From: jpd@space.mit.edu (John Doty)Newsgroups: rec.radio.shortwaveSubject: Low Noise Antenna ConnectionDate: 26 Nov 1993 16:55:24 GMT It doesn’t take very much wire to pick up an adequate signal for anything but the crudest shortwave receiver. The difference between a mediocre antenna system and a great antenna system isn’t the antenna itself: it’s the way you feed signals…