DIY 2M Ground Plane Antenna - Ham Radio - TheSmokinApe

all right folks so in today's video we are going to do a build of a two meter quarter wave ground plane antenna before we get started i wanted to mention that down here there's a bunch of buttons like button comment button subscribe button share button go ahead and click them it'll make you happy let's go get started [Music] now you may be asking yourself what the heck is a ground plane antenna and this website heavily influenced the design of the antenna that we're going to build in this video here's a calculator where i can type in a frequency and then i can click calculate and it tells me how long my vertical element should be and how long my radial should be we're going to cut our radials for 20 and a half inches now i know this calculator was a little bit different than that but i think it's going to work and there's some other calculators that gave some contradictory information i really like the design used in this website so i'll go ahead and i'll include a link to this one below where you can come over here and then you can check it out and get some ideas for yourself should you try to build a 2 meter ground plane antenna i really like that one here's another antenna calculator and again this link will be included below and then you can see that this one came out a little bit shorter just over 19 inches for both and that's how we landed on our 20 and a half inches that we're going to start out with this is a pretty simple to build and pretty effective antenna design the parts for this start off with some aluminum welding rods that i got off of amazon for about 15 bucks i got 25 3 foot rods i only needed 20 and a half inches for each one and you can see where i marked a half inch and you'll see why later i also used an s0239 connector i'm not sure if these welding rods are the best materials that you can use for this project but they seem to work pretty well a lot of people will use just a piece of solid core wire but i wanted the antenna to look nice and i wanted it to be rigid and not have a lot of flexibility here you can see they're eighth inch or 3.2 millimeters and this is a pound of rods and i said i think it's about 25 it might have been 23 it might have been 27. we also use some of these connectors this is a bullet connector for connecting wires together and what i used is i used a piece of rod to go ahead and push this metal part out and that connects nicely to our so239 jack i just put the small end on the on the on the center conductor there and we welded this on later and then i just dropped the element in crimped it down and soldered that connection now this is not a radial that we're going to use this was just a mock-up one side is at one inch and the other side is at a half inch and i think i like the half inch length better but again i just use these lug terminals to go ahead and mount that and we're going to mount those with some m3 bolts m3 times 12 to be exact so as i mentioned it's a pretty simple build what i want to do is i want to take the plastic off of these you don't have to but i always like to for me it makes it easier to crimp and then also i can see what i'm doing when i touch it up with a little bit of solder i want both a mechanical and an electrical connection you can see that fits right on there so i'll crimp it down and then hit it with a little bit of solder all right let's keep going as i mentioned you don't have to use these exact materials but it's what i chose to use one reason is i felt it was inexpensive 15 bucks for 25 rods and you don't even use a whole rod so you could make a 70 centimeter ground plane or do other projects with these particular devices here you can get some more information about the compound about the dimensions and things of that nature not going to go too far into it but again there'll be a link below and this is called an aluminum alloy i really don't know what the components of the actual rods are and i don't know what the velocity factor is and that can also impact your antenna dimensions i'm using a desk mounted vise and if you don't have one of these this was like 20 dollars it's super duper handy and i'm putting about a half inch of the rod in and i want to go ahead and i want to crimp this down pretty tight we want to go ahead and we want to bend these rods at a 45 degree angle now that angle of your radials compared to your vertical element can impact your radiation pattern and your swr it's my understanding that a best practice is to use about a 45 degree angle now i'm just going to go ahead and i'm going to bend that until it looks about 45 degrees to me and then i'm going to use the grid on my cutting mat you'll see that in a second where i can just go get a quick sanity check i don't believe that any of these were exactly 45 degrees but i think they're close enough for government work and that looks pretty good so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to finish this up for each one of the radials i do not want to put a 45 degree bend on the element i really should invest in a better set of crimpers because these are total crap they came bundled with a bunch of these wire terminal lugs so anyhow i want to put that on there and i want to make sure it's lined up as close as possible so i want i want the lug itself to be perpendicular to the element that goes down because i want it to go straight i'm just going to go ahead and i'm going to crimp this down and unfortunately i moved it off camera but here it comes back and i give it a real good squeeze and i do this in a couple of different places to make sure that i've got a solid mechanical connection we're going to go ahead and we're going to hit that with some solder a little bit but that doesn't look too bad and then here's how we're going to mount them with the m3 by 12 hex bolts we're going to use two washers and then a lock washer and then a nut and that should keep everything in place for us and then here we are with two of the radials mounted onto the jack doesn't look too bad so far i'm pretty happy assembly of the antenna went pretty quick tuning it is a whole other story but here we are with all four radials and now it's just time to put the element on so here we are out in the backyard and i wanted everybody to be able to view the antenna in all of its glory inside the studio there's not much space so i brought it out here so i could get a full shot now this is fully assembled but the antenna has not been tuned yet so we still have to go through that i also didn't solder any of the connections yet and the reason being is i didn't know what kind of adjustments i was going to need to make or if i was going to need to have to recut anything so i wanted to wait until after everything was tuned up now in order to get our measurements i use my nano vna h i love that thing and then we're also going to use nanovna saver which is a software program that makes it a little bit easier to interpret the results of my nanovna if you want to learn more about nanovnas and nanovna savers check out my playlist so here are the results the blue bar is the two meter band and then as you can see we're pretty high close to two swr it's a little bit lower on the front side a little bit higher on the back side of the band so we're going to make some changes here i cut these long in anticipation of having to trim it down you can see our dip below 1.13 is a little bit lower in the band so clearly this tells me that everything's just a little bit too long so i want to make some adjustments cutting a half inch did make some positive improvement it moved everything to the right and lowered the swr across the band so what did i do i cut another half inch off of the element now we're looking a little bit better so what i decided to do is go ahead and cut a half inch off of each one of the radials and we'll see what happened next even more improvement but i'm starting to get a little bit greedy here and i want to continue to move this stuff to the right i want that dip right in that blue band so i cut off a half inch from the element oh no it rows my swr up across the board that's not a good thing so i decided to recut the element this time i cut the element at 19 and a half inches and that looks pretty good but i'm still feeling a little bit greedy so i went i took another quarter inch off at this point i don't want to mess with it anymore i probably need to recut the radials but i'm not going to do that right now i'm happy with the swr as it stands in this picture okay thanks for the clarifications and uh another thought here is short of having to go downstairs and unplug it sounded like you did try a reset there on the software for the uh requesting a signal report sounds good over roger roger thanks for the signal report i just put up a uh a quarter wave uh antenna that i just built and i wanted to see how it sounds thank you for applying it to the repeater over to the input and your voices there is right at the noise level which the voices are on the input so uh i'd say it's working pretty good uh my antenna is up probably only about 10 or 10 or 15 feet about a 60 v gain antenna but i was copying on the input so it sounds to me like your radio's working fine i was getting great reports across a couple of different repeaters so i got brave and i decided to go ahead and give a holler on one four six five two zero and then this is what happened monitoring one four six five two monitoring one four six five two absolutely nothing just dead air i'm really happy with the way the build turned out now when you do this there's obviously some fine tuning that needs to take place and i don't think i did a perfect job i think that in version 2 of this antenna i'll be able to do a little bit better i'm going to start off the lengths of the elements and the radials all at 19 and a half inches i'll probably leave the radials at 19.5 inches and then slowly take off about an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch from the element and then maybe i'll get a little bit of swr now the purpose of this video is not to say build an antenna exactly like me it's just a way to show that you can build an inexpensive antenna that performs well that you can make your own by doing your own modifications and using your own materials it was really easy to do you do need a nano vna or some other antenna analyzer anyhow i want to say thanks to everybody for watching i really do appreciate it if you have any questions comments suggestions or recommendations go ahead and post them below and i'll do my best to respond thanks again everybody

Channel: TheSmokinApe

Views: 48,502

Keywords: 2 Meter Ground Plane Antenna, DIY, dipole, antenna, ham radio antenna, amateur radio antenna, best antenna for ham radio, radio, how to build an antenna, building an antenna, UnUn, smokinape, thesmokinape, ham radio

Id: blTsPISfhgE

Length: 10min 59sec (659 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020