Comparing Home Made Inmarsat Antennas

Over on his blog “coolsdrstuff”, the author has uploaded a new post showing his comparisons of various home made Inmarsat antennas. In his post he tests a tin can helix antenna, a 10-turn helix antenna, and a LHCP helix feed on a 81cm DirecTV dish.

His results show that the dish outperforms the helix antennas by a significant amount, but only once he took it outdoors. The 10-turn helix antenna also worked better than the tin can helix, although he found that it required very accurate pointing.

Inmarsat are geostaionary satellites that transmit signals on L-band at around 1.5 GHz. They transmit signals that can be decoded with an RTL-SDR, such as STD-C EGC (weather, messaging and safety messages for boats), as well as AERO (the satellite version of ACARS for aircraft).