My First 2-Meter Homebrew Antenna (Part 1)

I bought my first HT, a Tidradio TD-H6 on Amazon.com. It is a great budget friendly entry-level HT. In other words, not too much trouble from my wife when purchasing it. I’ll write another blog reviewing it later. I had one problem with my new HT and freshly minted Amateur Radio License from the FCC. Most of the social nets were on a repeater that was about 9 miles away. The only way I could get into the repeater to join the rag chew was to stand up and hold my HT in the air pointing the antenna at an angle in one window in the house. That was not going to work long term. I set out to make an antenna that would be portable and get me better performance out of my Baofeng clone HT.

My first attempt was making a J Pole antenna using some 300-ohm twin lead. This is many new Ham’s first home built antenna. There are plans all over the Internet and folks that rave about them. It fit the bill for ease and portability. Well, in my case, portability anyway. A Ham mentor gave me a length of twin lead to do this with and I was off and running. It didn’t work out too well for me. I botched the soldering terribly. I learned that day that soldering the aluminum braid on 75-ohm RG-6 was nearly impossible, but that was what I had to work with. I went back to the Internet to search for ideas.

My second attempt was a Bazooka. This is a vertically mounted piece of coax where the braid is cut and peeled back over the sheathing to a particular length and having the center conductor exposed for a particular length (about 19 inches for the 2-Meter band). This didn’t work out too well, and I tried a number of variations. The closest I got it to work was when following the directions from someone else using 75-ohm RG-6 coax. This including wrapping the sheathing with tin foil along with the braid for better conductivity. However, I still couldn’t trigger that popular repeater and without an SWR meter or antenna analyzer, I couldn’t know what I needed to adjust.

Now I was really frustrated and about to go spend some money on Amazon.com, which of course would not make my wife happy. But then I remembered a YouTube video I had watched on Kevin Loughin’s – KB9RLW YouTube channel about the tried and true standard dipole. This is an antenna more typically used in HF applications, not VHF/UHF, but I was going to give it a try. I cut another 20 feet of 75-ohm RG-6 from my spool I had in the shed and I cut a 24 inch piece of 12-2 with ground Romex I had from adding a bathroom outlet a while back.

I soldered on a PL-259 to one end of the coax and stripped out the other end. My memory was still strong with my attempt to solder the aluminum braid before so this time I went back to my trusty electrician’s tool belt and pulled out two wire nuts. I twisted the aluminum braid of the coax together and wire nutted it to one length of the #12 solid copper. I wire nutted the center coax conductor to the other piece of #12 solid copper. I measured out 20 inches from the feed point (wire nuts) and clipped each side. I propped this monstrosity up on the top of a book case and connected it to my HT.

Cue the fanfare. It worked! It was ugly, and an antenna purest would scoff first at the use of 75-ohm RG-6 cable television coax and second at the wire nuts, but it worked! I don’t currently have an SWR meter so my only way of testing was to just key up and see if anyone was monitoring; and there was. Stephen WM7X of the Spout Springs Repeater Association was monitoring. Come to find out he was one of the VEs during my Technician’s test. He said I was sending a clear signal. I relayed my antenna adventure to him and he chuckled and then encouraged me to keep experimenting. But it worked! I spent the next couple of weeks using this just like it was.

Then I started trying to figure out a way to make my ugly 2-Meter dipole a little more permanent, but also somewhat portable. You can read part 2 at https://kj7rdy.conklincomputing.com/antennas/my-first-2-meter-homebrew-antenna-part-2/