A Crude Skew Planar Wheel Antenna for Receiving GPS L1 with an RTL-SDR
Over on his blog /dev/thrash RTL-SDR experimenter Elia has been attempting to build an antenna to receive Global Positioning System (GPS) signals with his RTL-SDR. After doing some research he decided to build a Skew Planer Wheel antenna which he tuned for the GPS L1 frequency at 1575.42 MHz. A Skew Planar Wheel antenna is circularly polarized omnidirectional antenna which can be built out of wire. It is well suited to receiving signals from low earth orbiting (LEO) satellites such as the GPS satellites.
Elia later tested his antenna with a commercial GPS receiver circuit and was able to obtain a GPS fix.
GPS is actually in MEO (12hr crispin316,200km) not LEO.
Does this antenna has any advantages over standard GPS antennas?
There is a video and some photos here (not mine) than made it a bit clearer to me anyhow, what the shape of the antenna actually is:
http://vk6ysf.com/skew_planar_wheel_antenna.htm