A Cooking Pot L-Band Antenna

Over on YouTube Adam 9A4QV has uploaded a video showing us his home made cooking pot L-band antenna. The antenna consists of a large aluminum cooking pot which acts as a reflector and a cross-dipole inside the pot acting as the antenna.

The antenna is placed at a height of exactly 1/4 wavelength from the base of the pot, and the cross dipole wire lengths are 0.52 and 0.42 wavelengths long. They are different wavelengths as this achieves circular polarization. Adam writes that the gain should be about 4 – 5 dB’s better than a patch antenna.

The first video shows the performance of the antenna in SDR# when receiving the Outernet and Inmarsat/Alphasat L-band satellite signals indoors. Together with an LNA4ALL and RTL-SDR, Adam gets about 8 dB on the Outernet signal and 24 dB on AERO.