Building a DIY Carbon Fibre Yagi Antenna with 3D Printed Parts for 20€

Over on his blog author Manuel a.k.a ‘Tysonpower’ has written about a DIY Carbon Fibre Yagi antenna that he’s built for only 20€. The antenna is very lightweight thanks to a 12mm diameter carbon fibre pipe which is used as the main boom. It also uses 3D printed parts that clamp onto the carbon fibre pipe and hold the metal elements in place. The advantage of the carbon fibre pipe over a PVC one is not only is it lightweight and much easier to hold, but it also stronger, and much less bendy and floppy. The metal elements are welding rods which he found on eBay, and the carbon fibre pipe was sourced cheaply from China with Aliexpress. 

A Yagi is a directional antenna with high gain towards the direction it is pointing. You’ll need to hand point the Yagi in the general direction of the satellite as it passes over, but you can expect much higher SNR readings compared to something like a QFH or Turnstile.

Manuel designed his antenna for 2M satellites (NOAA, Meteor M2, ISS etc), and was able to achieve over 36 dB SNR with an RTL-SDR.com V3 receiver, FM Trap and LNA4ALL on NOAA 18 at a 34° max. pass. He writes that the design is easily modifiable for other frequencies too.

To show off the design, construction and performance of his antenna he’s uploaded two videos to YouTube which we show below. The speech is in German, but even for non-German speakers the video is easily followed

[EN subs] Yagi Antenne aus Carbon bauen (140mhz, 3 Elemente) - DIY

Über 36db SNR!- Test der DIY Yagi aus Carbon

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daniel

Hi,
I have been doing experiment the last 5 years with carbon fibre antenna,
Surprisingly after hundreds of experiments I came to the conclusion that the rods are behaving like aluminium or copper with one exception: they are much lighter and their wind load in much smaller than their replacement.
Please find some of my antenna pictures on https://www.rylwy.com/carbon-antenna
Regards
Daniel
M0HWD

loktol

I’m a litte confused about the measurements.. In the antenna building figure in “7db for 7bucks” the director is much further away from the driven element than the Reflector is from the driven element… Shouldnt it be the other way around?

AD5NL

Very cool build. Unfortunately my high-school German is a bit dusty. Anyone care to list the parts in English?

Tysonpower

I posted them in english on Thingiverse.
The blog post on my Website is also in english 🙂
Hope that helps.

regards,
Manuel