I made an HF Dipole for free! Reception was good on my AirSpy HF+ Discovery SDR! 

I'm very glad to see you recycle old copper like this. We don't need to spend a fortune on antennas. Baluns, as I'm sure many people will find out, can become a slightly contentious issue! For example, are they baluns or ununs? There are many Ham experts on the issue, but of course they are mostly focused on transmission. You usage here would suggest a balun I think, as you are balancing two sides of the dipole. I have used the Nooelec 9:1 balun and also the cheap Chinese knockoffs and they work good, but it's not hard to wind your own on small and cheap type 43 toroids. (You only need small ones and not the huge expensive ones used by Hams for transmission lines. 140-43 or 114-43 are easy to use. If you are good with your fingers, 82-43 or even 50-43 are possible. They are very cheap). There are fancy ways to do it or the simple old fashioned way of say 27 windings on the antenna/ground side and 9 for the feedline. A 3:1 ratio in windings translates to a 9:1 balun/unun. I have wound ununs like this for all 5 HF antennas in my garden and the improvement in signal quality is absolutely outstanding. I weatherproof the wound toroids with self-sealing rubber tape. I have yet to make a good balun for my one HF dipole. I understand that the balun should be wound 2:1, perhaps 20 on the antenna side and 10 for the feedline, giving a 4:1 ratio. Maybe it's just my rubbish winding skills, bit I have so far always ended up with a worse signal. I've been in the hobby for about 6 years now and discovering how baluns/ununs can increase the signal to noise ratio was a very important discovery and I'd encourage everyone to look into this aspect.

I love videos like this. Very frugal which is great for us mortal frugal hard working people. 😄👍

Great and enjoyable content!!! Thanks for the time and effort to put this video together!

You have an awesome channel man! So glad I found it…been learning tons!

Great video and antenna demo. Thanks for including all the sample received audio.

Yet another great and informational video thanks. Rob

Thank you. I'm going to try a similar system next week.

Excellent and most welcome video. This illustrates how easy it is to build a working receive antenna on the cheap.

Amazing as always Rob ! Keep up the great content ! . Happy Canada Day as well 🇨🇦

Hi Rob. Found your channel by mistake, great video brings bad many fond memories when I was a Ham back in the late 70's. Did the same trick using some old coax whilst I worked as Security for the Reading Festival in 1979. Used 27MHz, measured the length, split the core and shield into 3.4m lengths, then asked the onsite Busby engineer (it was still the GPO in those days) to attach one end to the top rung of the telegraph pole next to my security caravan. Many happy hours allegedly working! Will explore more of your channel. Cheers.

Great video & great information Rob! Love the SDRs!! Working here on adding some broadcast filters to assist the RTL-SDR. Cheers! 👍⚡📻

Hey, would like to thank you, this video guided me to make my first HF antenna for SWL with sdr. I was missing space so just made a 5m with some antenna coax 75ohms and a cheap nooelec balun. Got some nice results on the 20 meters band ! So yeah, thanks to you for this idea ^^

Thanks for the video, very informative. I also like your or whosoever Jeep Cherokee that is.

It is always a good idea to save some copper from trash. :) Though it is not free - due to the balun - it is still very cheap. Having a 9:1 balun, I would rather use it for a long wire antenna instead dipole. (One contact for antenna wire and one for grounding. Impedance matching is better this way.) One more good step ahead for a brave hobbist is making a trap antenna. The necessary components would not make it more expensive. I really like your videos. Keep making them! :)

Great video. Yes the Ham bands were busy this weekend. It was field day. 73 AE0IY.

I have enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, listening to aircraft on HF out over the Atlantic. I have never been able to get into the HAM Radio stuff though. I just don’t find what they talk about very interesting - sorry! I appreciate there are restrictions by way of license conditions on what they can discuss. My garden isn’t very big, so getting 20 metres of wire out would be impossible. Perhaps you could show us some ideas for compact HF antennae, please. I used a centre-fed dipole with random unequal length elements, and it was still pretty amazing what I was able to receive. Thanks for another really interesting video. 👍

Good job, I have this balun but older version. My choice for wire was speaker wire. :)

Yeah, I love nooelec's balun 1:9s. I use one as a connector for my ads-b antenna made out of old cable tv coax, and the other for good ol' speaker wire dipole. :-D

I just recently subscribed to your channel. You make very informative videos. I'm new to SDR and put up a 100ft single wire antenna but strangely I'm receiving AM radio stations all the way into higher frequency bands (25MHz+) and some stations are even being duplicated. Why is this happening and is there a fix? Thanks

Great inspiration! I've found a really cheap balun for cctv cameras and i know that a balun antenna is better for HF but i would like to know if it will work also on the 4M band. I love to do experiments but i don't like to waste money ahaha

Awesome! I live in an apartment complex and been using a megaloop mla-30+. I have the 1:9 balun as well and out apartment is 2 story with some trees directly out back. Maybe I should sting up a tall dipole!

I've got a spool of 30m cable (with single threaded copper core) sitting in the shed doing nothing, an RTL-SDR and a friend gave me one of his spare 9:1 baluns, any advice as to what I can do with it? I don't have any Ham it Up ,or Airspy HF type stuff yet. Not sure if I should cut the 30m cable into two 15m cables and make a dipole, or turn it into a long wire. I'm still learning the ropes here, it's all new to me.

Hi, brilliant video. Can the balun be collected directly to the Ham It up or does it need to be connected to some coax?

What sampling mode and AGC settings do you use to listen to Ham phone traffic?

That device is actually an Unun, not meant for balanced antennas. If you cut the black wire the colored wire to 10.8m, and cut the black wire to 5.33m and lay the black wire on the ground, you may improve reception. Recommended lengths for the colored wire in feet (sorry mate) are 29 35.5 41 58 71 84 107 119 148 203 347 407 423.

Would be fun setting up an 80M dipole in North Belfast. Many questions would be asked lol

Great video Rob just wondering was that the 9 > 1 nooelec Balun ? ( I can see (Balun One Nine ) but wasn't sure if that's what it meant. I love Aviation come on mate where was the HF Sel Call Decoder going tom the side or on the next screen :-) All the new SDR Infrastructure is slowly coming together, just waiting on a new 12m lattice mast to arrive, hoping this weekend to get the Inmarsat Ant on the air ( I got called into work last weekend :-( ). Loving the RTL-SDR & the SDRduo I've even got a dedicated dual 21" screen PC for them. Once I get the both of them mastered I'll but another SDRduo and put it on line. Take care and keep up the great video. Rgs Wayne.

At around 8:40 what is that sweeping signal that starts around 6.950 MHz? Very curious to know!

Now that's inspiring me into resuming SDR exploration after months without touching it... Of course the conditions here don't help - I live in a ground floor apartment with small windows. Could be worse though, as the neighborhood buildings all have 2-3 floors only.

Is it better to use a thicker wire like this or a thinner wire? If thicker is better, I might re-work my dipole. Thanks!

I think for the CBC Radio Calgary signal you were tuned to 1010 AM. 660kHz is CFFR. Can't wait for the weather to warm up so I can try my HF+ Discovery outdoors. Way too much interference indoors here using a YouLoop

is there anyone out there that can explain to how to do dsdplus in detail? i see video's but no one actually shows how to set it up

Did you ground your dipole? Or no, I’m planning on trying this out soon

Thanks. I'd love to see you showing the sdrangel software, possibly on Linux Thank you if you may consider it.

the easiest "balun" to make is a choke balun, 240 size 43 mix toroid (£6 ish) 8 turns of the coax wound on to it (about 1 meter) and that's it, done! it will work from 80 meters to 10 meters.

How will it work on 20 and 40?

Hi! Dose the thickness of the wire matter?

Hello. How to you figure out the distance for the transmission location?

Is that a Bunker ?

Not sue that a 9:1 balun on a dipole is a good idea. That would far better match the 50 ohm coax without the 9:1 balun.

Dave Ramsey!

So how long is it cut in US feet?

Great Video, Similar To My Setup, BUT Difrent In A Big Way Because My Antenna Starts From My Attic And Coax Goes Down In Middle, Well.. , Is It Posible You Join The Disocrd And Take A Look At My Setup Please? I Don`t Know How My Antenna SHOULD Be For 3500MHz And Up To 24Mhz Because There Are The Hams In my Country And Neighbor Countries I Would Love To Listen, But My Antenna BAARELY Picks Them Up, I Listened To WEB.SDR That Is 200KM Away From My Location On The Oposite Side From Russia From My Location AND IT PICKS RUSSIAN HAMS UP BETTER THEN MY SETUP So I Have N CLUE What Is My problem, I Have MsPaint Pictures With My Setup, I Would Be So Thankful If Anyone Could Spent A Minute Of Your Precious Time And Help Me With This One ANd Tell Me What Im Doing Wrong, I Really Want To Listen To The Frequencies Because Then I Will Set Up One SDR As A Web.Sdr And After That I WIll Work On Much More Web.Sdrs To Put Out.. Okey, The Link Too The Discord Page Is This - discord.gg/Zv8HAAtu6m