Saturday, November 9, 2013

Two Stack Dipole Using Power Divider






My friend ask me If I can make a two stack dipole for his 92.9MHz FM station and I decided to construct this project using a home made coaxial power divider using a two piece quarter-wave long 75 ohm coaxial cable. The two 75 ohm coax was connected in parallel to obtain 37.5 ohm which is the required impedance for our power divider. I also use a 1 wavelength long 50 ohm coax feeding the two dipoles and along with it, a short piece of wire that act as a pawsey stub that makes the dipole feed point balance. The 1 wavelength long 50 ohm coax was also chosen so that each dipole can be vertically spaced at 1 wavelength for gain optimization.


A plastic element insulator hold the dipole segments on a 1"x1" square tube boom. The feed point connection was carefully protected with a layer of rubber tape and on top of it is an electrical tape for UV and water protection.

A  fabricated  bracket  will hold the antenna boom and this was made of a thick plastic material, the one used here was a chopping board 5mm in thick.


A close up view of the coaxial power divider during initial tuning and testing.


A quick frequency sweep was made to evaluate the antenna SWR after the trimming of dipole segments. The antenna bandwidth was quite narrow for this design and I was able to obtain an SWR value of 1:1.2 across 92MHz to 93MHz only.


During testing, the two dipoles were spaced 1 wavelength horizontally and was 1 meter above the ground  just only to evaluate the SWR and tune the antenna while at the ground. When installed permanently, this antenna is expected to yield  3dBd of gain theoretically.    73 de du1vss