My First 2-Meter Homebrew Antenna (Part 2)

If you haven’t read the first part of this blog, I encourage you to navigate to https://kj7rdy.conklincomputing.com/antennas/my-first-2-meter-homebrew-antenna-part-1/ and check out how I arrived at this point.

My ugly wire nutted 2-meter dipole was working well, but it was fragile and not really mobile at all. It was time to beef it up and make it less experimental and more packable and re-deployable.

I picked up a tip for homemade non-conductive backing material from the Kevin Loughin KB9RLW YouTube channel. He uses plastic cutting boards from WalMart as terminal board and mounting material. So I picked up a 9″X12″ cutting board for $1.78 from WalMart along with a variety pack of screws and nuts for a few dollars. That was all the material I needed. My design was pretty solid and I did have one other thought, but I’ll leave that for a future part 3.

First I laid out my 3″x3″ terminal/backing board in marker on a corner of the cutting board and cut it out using a hand saw.

The plan was to have three hanging holes (top, bottom, right) and then 4 terminal screw points in a row. The top and right side holes were to hang it on a wall, in a tree, or anywhere else I needed to. Hanging from the top hole would orient the antenna horizontally and hanging it from the right side hole would orient the antenna vertically. The bottom hole is to hang a choke if it becomes necessary.

I cut it out and drilled out all the holes with a 3/16″ drill bit. Just big enough for the 3/4″ screws to go through. I later realized I needed the hanging holes to be bigger to get a rubber band or 550 paracord through so they were enlarged to 3/8″.

Now it was time to put terminals on my 75-ohm RG6 coax and my #12 solid copper wires. The #12 copper was no problem. I crimped on the ring terminals and then soldered them in place. The RG6 was a bit more troublesome, but crimping on the ring terminals and then getting enough solder in and around the twisted aluminum braid wasn’t overly difficult.

With the soldering now complete, a couple of #12 copper jumpers were installed between the terminals. This was so I could ultimately add enough silicone sealant to cover the coax feed point and water proof it but leave the #12 copper terminals free to install and remove the wire antenna segments. Another note, the nuts for the #12 copper wires will more than likely be replaced with wing-nuts to make installing and removing easier down the road.

I was sure to connect the right side terminal to the center conductor of the coax so if I orient the antenna in a vertical fashion, that #12 copper wire is pointed up.

All that was left to do was to adjust the length of the #12 copper wires to tune the antenna. I used a couple of different antenna calculators to decide on 19 3/4″ as the optimum length of the wires from the feed point. I was sure to include the 1/2″ jumper as part of my total length. I added a couple of wine corks (what else do you use in wine country?) to the ends of the wire to keep them from being dangerous and hung the whole thing from the top of a bookshelf. Ta-da!

It worked even better than it did when it was there and just connected with wire nuts. I suspect that is because of the special attention I put in to measuring the length of the wire segments this time whereas before it was longer so I had room to trim if I needed to. I obviously needed to.

I have a couple of ideas to make this even better and more portable for taking on hikes and camping. I’m looking at replacing the #12 copper wires with telescoping antenna segments and adding an SO-239 to make connectivity more versatile. Stay tuned for updates.