Groundplane Antenna for Meshtastic 

Excellent work Simon & thank you for sharing .

I built a new 868Mhz quarterwave groundplane last week. I'll pop a picture on Andy Kirby's Discord's meshtastic-antenna-chat because it is probably the most attractive antenna I've ever made when every other quaaterwave groundplane I've ever made looked like something out of Mad Max :)

Hi, after watching your videos I made the same and it works well. Thanks

Good job 👍 I just ordered a t deck to play with

Re the 'pokey' ends on the ground plane antenna - go to your local hardware or garden store and get some plastic wire nuts (puck a nice bright colour). Once the antenna is tuned up, take a file and roughen the last 5mm or so of the radials and epoxy the wire nuts on the end. The wire nuts will make the ends easier to spot and stop them from jabbing you.

Very much enjoyed watching this

Great video. I made one of these with 1.4mm copper wire. The swr was 2 ish so I added more ground elements and now it’s 1.4. I made a second one of measuring tape and it’s 1.5 swr.

Brilliant & interesting. 👍 Steven Spielberg would be proud of the filming 😀😊

Very impressive! Thank you for the video.

I understand you wanted to keep it cheap and simple. I would have used a commercial antenna mount and a double colinear antenna for gain since you are operating in the flea-power range where every Db counts. At 800MHz and higher, such antennas are still fairly small and manageable.

I did a very similar build! works well! Thanks for sharing.

I only interface with my VNA through software, I find the menus and calibration much easier that way. I use NANOVNASAVER software

Great video and inspiration to make my own antenna (Always a first)..

This is very convenient for me I am doing the same tests rightnow with the same equipment because I started with Meshtastic recently. I also wanted to check a J pole antenna.Meshtastic is not that populair in NL perhaps it will grow in the future here. Thanks for this nice video

Great video, thank you for sharing!

Very interesting. Thanks for the video.

According to a Farnell data sheet, RG316 is about 0.86dB/m at 20 deg C.

We’re here for the antenna and you go off on a tangent with a spectrum analyzer

I LOVE That I Got Copper Like, Hundreds Of Kilograms For Cents Bback In The Day, Now When Im Making Antenna I Have Loops Of Loops Of Copper Wires, Thick, Think, Smaller Then Hair, Even Like Ingot Size, But Its A Wire, Wire From OLD USSR Welding machine, the wire thickness is 5mm And Width Is 1cm and its hardened so whenever i want o makme something out of it i just cut it off and if i need to make it softer i just put the torch on the wire, if yiu can call it a wire ;D made doorhandles for the whole house because copper is killing viruses in 10minutes and steel kills viruses in 3 days for comparison and when you ahve copper doorhandles all around the house, it counts , i havent been sick since i put them on, but higiene is always needs to be done to you know, but jeah, i have tens if not hundreds of kilometers in various copper wire. also what i got is so much ussr soviet made components, germanium diodes and everything, all that costed me like nothing compared if i would buy it all frome bay or marketplaces. :) Sweet video, that snipping part resonated with me cuz i did the same :D

Some interesting techniques there Simon

Use the CW-Function in the Stimulus menu to transmit on a single frequency. I dont know what thats short for but Carrier Wave maybe?

Brilliant video! I'm quite curious how much loss is happening in the feeder cable? That thin coax is rather hard on WiFi frequencies at least and for long distance WiFi feeds I ended up using LMR400 which then needed adapters that introduced more loss but the total was far below the loss from smaller diameter feeders.

I'm worried that the white shoe will give different results from the black booty radiator you used to use :)

"loved your drumming work!" First reaction when I saw the 239 connecter in the placeholder in conjunction with Meshtastic I had bit of a raised eyebrow moment, but "what was at hand" ... I'd have done same. Amazon sell 5 packs of similar configuration chassis SMA for 16quid. "Superbat SMA Connectors SMA Female 4 Holes Panel Chassis Mount Flange Solder Cup Connector SMA Bulkhead Connector 5-Pack" Chuckled when you showed your fave' antenna, at first glance it was very similar (but not the same as) Andy Kirbys dodgy one - the youtube placeholder pic says it all :- ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Y4qXn_gOTY8.html Good video, many thanks for sharing dude.

Nice informative video, Thanks :)

What connector would you reccoment if building this type of the antenna ? as you said this one is not ideal for use...

I made these for 2.4g wifi back in 2010. They did not work well. The ground plane is highly distorted like a cloverleaf. Dipole is better for a tourus radiation pattern.

I have made a few of these using brass tube for the driven element and an old coat hanger for the radials. seems to match your performance with the exception that best SWR Performance is achieved with the radials at about 10 degrees off horizontal. Is swr the only thing we need to consider? is there another unmeasured benefit from increasing the angle of the radials n

i would of gone for Pipe Screw End caps - also look up lasersaber - DIY SOLN1 - Portable Solar Power now yoiu can gave a nice Flashing RED LED Beacn Powered by mains

I think I might venture to have a go at this. Found in my bag of connectors a N type chassis socket, still in its bag from Maplin, so maybe that should go into the history museum instead.

I used welding wire as I have a huge supply of the stuff

👍👍👍