20100805

I picked up some PVC pipe from Bunnings and set about building a nice enclosure for my dipole antennas. Once I put it together, I discovered that when held up in the air, the minimum VSWR was now much greater than 150 MHz! It turns out that lying it down on the floorboards is still bad, though better than having it on my spring mattress.

So, I made a new one and trimmed the element length down to 43cm to get a nice response at 150 MHz and a bit above, though it wasn't quite perfect - VSWR was around 1.5-2. But still pretty decent! Looks pretty nice, too. Now, to make four.

Well, I've made two, but it looks like I don't have enough copper pipe for the next two - also four more PVC tee pieces would be handy.