A little home brew

[JCagle]

I have been toying with the idea of building another antenna some time. I had built a couple for use on the house and had been pleased with the results. My previous antennas were built on the 1/4 wave blueprint for the 2m band all together for use on my base unit at home.

I sat down and did some math and decided to make a 1/4 wave railroad band antenna to swap out with the whip I had had on my truck for several years now. Most days it would pick up about 9 miles for detectors and 10-12 for crews calling signals. Not bad reception at all for a mobile antenna.

Without getting into the radio theory too much a little calculation led me to the length of 17.4 inches for the 1/4 wave length of the railroad band. I added in the length of the outside of the stud mount I was building the antenna on and cut the rod to length for about 17.5 inches above the nut on the hub. (anything within about a half inch of the desired frequency length calculation is close enough for those of us garage building). Plus it is a lot easier to mark at 17.5 inches as opposed to 17.4..

I got a chance to build a new mount and test today. I have been pleased with the performance in several locations.  When I was visiting my Mom today I could get crews calling signals on the S-line which is about 15 miles or so from her house. Some of the signals were about 20 miles as the crow flies which isn't bad in my book. After I got home tonight I came out to do a little more testing where there is more traffic on the Southern main near my house. so far I have picked up crew chatter from about 25 miles away. Before I could hear the tower but never yard chatter at Linwood (25 miles or so away depending on location in the yard) Detectors for about 15 miles, and I even caught the Danville dispactcher on a tower 70 miles away. Not a bad little build I suppose.

I priced similar antennas from suppliers at something like 50-60 bucks, and this one cost me about 5 bucks in parts and less than an hour to build and install. Most of my install time was in rerouting wiring to the new location on my truck.

My parts list:
1/8" brass rod
stud connector
solder
2"x8"x 1/8" aluminum sheet (for mounting bracket)
flat black spray paint

I can go into more details if anyone is interested. Just let me know!