Tagged: half-wave

Radio For Everyone New Posts: Building an ADS-B Station, Easy Homemade Beginner ADS-B Antennas

Akos the author of the radioforeveryone.com blog has recently added two new articles to his blog. The first post is a comprehensive guide to setting up your own ADS-B station. The guide focuses on creating a system that is easy to use, has good performance and is value for money. In the post he shows what type of computing hardware is required, what software can be used and what RTL-SDR dongles work best. He also shows what choices are available when it comes to amplification and filtering to improve signal reception and goes on to talk a bit about adapters and the antennas that work best for him.

BuildingADS-Bstation
Building a ADS-B station

 In the second post Akos shows more on how to build your own beginners antennas for ADS-B reception. The post focuses on showing how to modify the stock magnetic mount antenna that comes with most RTL-SDR dongles, and how to build a half-wave ‘spider’ antenna entirely out of coax cable. The post is full of easy to follow images which make it great for beginners.

EDIT: It’s been pointed out in the comments by antenna experts/enthusiasts that the 1/2 wave ground plane antenna described by Akos in his tutorial may not be technically correct. A 1/2 wave antenna has a huge impedance which requires some sort of matching. Without matching there is going to be about 10 dB of loss due to the mismatch, and so the antenna will perform poorly. We recommend sticking with a 1/4 wave design, which is essentially the same as Akos’ 1/2 wave ground plane antenna, just with the element lengths halved.