So I was fooling around with some random materials from my STEM class, and somehow made a helical antenna out of thin air. After going through the library of Alexandria, – that is, my storage bins-- I found my old broken RTLSDR Dipole’s feed, which was perfect for this project.
I cut a spindle I found in my garage and drilled some holes in it (I forgot to space them out, but whatever). After wrapping some copper wire from the STEM class the antenna part was complete. I then used leftover copper wire (insulated) to use as the feed, which is VERY loosely attached to the broken end of the dipole feed.
First NOAA 18 downlink during the daytime under a roof was successful. The little cutouts in the middle of the image were from me accidentally moving or shaking the table, disconnecting the feeds. It can pick up cubesats and orbcomm satellites extremely well.
In conclusion to all of this mad scientist type creation, I essentially saved $500 by using literal scrap. Thought this would be interesting to share here.
73s to all!!
- Kira
