The second project of the day was a dual band antenna to try to hit amateur satellites with. This particular one is 2 m & 70 cm. The construction is 1/8″ brass rod with a small duplexer. There are no results to report so far, other than we were able to hit a local 2 m repeater with it. There was one pass of the satellite SO-50 this evening, but we didn’t get anything. We were also in the house and without a good compass, so it doesn’t count. The construction was fairly simple, and some reference sites are listed below. It should have a reasonable amount of gain, and the duplexer should be effective at splitting the signal between the bands, and it should be tuned correctly, but I don’t have the proper tools on hand to test any of that. One of these days I’ll get an oscilloscope, a signal generator, and an SWR meter, and I’ll be much better able to test a lot of these things at that point.

For today though, it was a fun project, and my first attempt at surface mount soldering. Future plans are to do some more testing in the 2 m and 70 cm bands with other ground based radios at both 1 and 5 watts to try and verify the duplexer is functioning, and an outdoor test to try to hit SO-50 once we’re sure the antenna is working.

• http://k0lee.com/duplexer.php
• http://www.wa5vjb.com/yagi-pdf/cheapyagi.pdf
• http://www.wa5vjb.com/references/Cheap%20Antennas-LEOs.pdf
• http://www.g6lvb.com/HomebrewArrow.htm