Make a Discone Antenna out of Coax

This antenna is designed to be "cheap" : )

I have a scanner and it works great with it, but thats not all I also plugged it into my digital TV convertor and some of the channels were the strongest I have seen them, some were down but snipping or adding to the length of the radils/whip would tune it into these digital TV freq. exactly!!!!

DANGER! DO NOT MOUNT IT NEAR POWER LINES!

The antenna must be in the vertical position, meaning that the tip of the vertical portion away from the coaxial cable must be up towards the sky.

The 3 radials are soldered on and bent in 3 equal directions with the angle about 45 deg. down from horizontal, similar to the simple drawing in the video:

Material list
1. Coaxial cable. I used RG6

2. Wire for the radials. I used aluminum grounding wire. Final length....About 20 inches each (3 pieces) #12 or #14 works well and is more stiff than smaller wire size. !

3. Wire for the vertical section. Actually, this wire will come from within the coaxial cable by removing the outer insulation and the shield, make sure to also remove any silver paper, heat helps this silver foil to be removed I found.

4. Soldering gun or iron, solder and sealer for the coax radial junction. This keeps the rain out and is very important.

5. Assorted hand tools, sharp knife for trimming insulation from coaxial cable.

.

The best ways to construct a scanner antenna is to take your full length of coax and remove the outer insulation AND the shield for about 21 or 22 inches from one end leaving the inner wire exposed with it's insulation intact. The idea here is to leave about 21 to 22 inches of the center conductor (wire) exposed with it's insulation intact after you remove the other section containing the outer insulation and the shield. You also need to leave about 1 inch of the shield exposed for soldering of the 3 radials to it! Refer to the video, I make three small connections for the radials from the coax shielding.

The radials should be soldered to the shield being careful not to destroy the insulation for the "center" conductor of the coaxial cable. These 3 radials should not be attached to the center conductor (wire) that is inside the cable. If this happens, then the antenna will become useless! See the drawing in the video.
Make sure you leave the insulation on the center wire until after you are done with the construction OR as an option, you may just leave it on to help protect the wire inside it from the ravages of rain, snow, corrosion...., Leaving the insulation on will in not effect the performance of the antenna!
The 3 radials need not be soldered in 3 different places (as I did) on the coax shield unless you want to go to the trouble of doing this....

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• PSBsatellite
• SatellitePlus.US
• TRAXIS
• Spitfire
• Hot
• dish