Home Made Coat Hanger Discone
Reddit user soooooil has posted a series of images showing his home made Discone antenna made out of wire coat hangers and designed for a minimum frequency of 130MHz. His thread discussing the Discone is here.
A Discone is a good general antenna for the rtl-sdr as they are extremely wideband, and can be expected to be useful over almost the entire frequency range that is tuneable by the the rtl-sdr.
Another page on a home made Discone also designed for a minimum of 130MHz is here with some brief instructions links to design calculators.
I had good results from a discone made from chicken netting (general purpose wire mesh with holes 20mm). In conjunction with my Yupiteru scanner I was able to go down to shortwave and pick up weatherfax on 8Mhz. It was placed in my attic so didnt need to be windproof.
Almost looks like a lampshade with the fabric removed.
Judging by its appearance (Sooooooil’s homemade dicone), could you use the front wheel off a bmx and some old tent poles or something similar? Clearly I’m no expert but I think I’m on to something here. If it’s just for receiving do things have to be exact lengths and dimensions? could I put a bmx wheel on top of a silent picket tripod (those corkscrew iron poles they used in ww1 to wrap barbed wire around in no mans land)? in reply to Ferdinands comment from four years ago, I don’t get it. Breakfast, soup, raspberry, oats, are we talking scones?
Or soup, a-tin-o soup, antenna soup? How about a tin of tuner! Oh missus, what a wonderful day to open a tin of Marconi cheese! anyone? Is this going out live or will I have to wait another four years. RIP Ken Dodd.
That is actually beautiful 🙂
Wow, just look at all those shorted turns! I wonder why commercial discones don’t have the circular wire tying together the ends of all the radials? Hmmm….
Cheaper, easier for anyone to construct, less weight, and much easier to disassemble for shipping.
But mainly because it doesnt make a noticeable difference in performance.
The ideal discone would be a solid sheet metal disc and cone, but its not worth the trouble.
I enjoy high-end wideband and broadband antennas every morning with my breakfast soup. My favorite antenna is the raspberry oats discone.