Monday, October 24, 2011

Turnstile Antenna for FM Broadcast






Above photo is the hand drawn illustration of my own version of Turnstile antenna used for my fm broadcast test station. It is basically two dipoles feed using a 75 ohms phasing harness but intentionally one of the dipole is 90 degrees delayed from the other dipole in order to have a circular polarization. You may find my design differs from the usual turnstile antenna posted in the internet anyway, in my project the two open dipoles is known to have an input impedance of 75 ohms. Feeding the these dipoles using a 75 ohms phasing harness will not transform the impedance therefore two 75 ohms phasing line in parallel will yield 37.5 ohms. You may find the 37.5 ohms a little mismatch with our 50 ohms transmission line but this will just raise the standing wave ratio to 1.3 : 1 which i think not too bad for the transmitter. For those who would like a perfect match, you can include a matching transformer out of coaxial cable but be reminded for the additional loss it would create. To avoid feedline radiation, pawsey stub was installed to each dipole using a #16 stranded wire cut to a quarter wave length of the operating frequency. When computing the phasing harness, include the velocity factor for the coaxial cable used. The signal polarization of this antenna is circular and purposely chosen to minimize the multipath fading. The theoretical gain is only -3dBd reference to a vertical dipole therefore multiple stacking is recommended.   ---73 de hevir


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