Message-ID: <19981109200356.5191.qmail@www01.netaddress.usa.net>
Date: Mon, 09 Nov 1998 20:03:56
From: Dan Schaefer <dfschaefer@usa.net>
To: lancair.list@olsusa.com
Subject: antennas, home made
Mime-Version: 1.0

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Regarding Angier Ames' comment about building and locating his MB
antenna, go for it! While I am a big fan of Bob Nuckolls, of 
Aeroelectric Connections, you should also get the info about designing
antennas from RST Engineering. According to Marv, they still have the
antenna kits available, and if you follow the instructions (quite
simple, really) you can make some very good ones.

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I built my Nav/Localizer, MB, 
GS and Transponder antennas from RST kits. Primarily because I wanted
to build as many of the things that went into N235SP and because I
wasn't impressed with the stuff that was available on the market.
For the antennas mentioned above, they are easy to design with the
info from RST and, in my opinion, they perform notably better than 
any used on certificated spam-cans that I've flown.

The Nav antenna was built into the horizontal stab (of course, mine's
glass, not carbon), the MB ant. is in the fuselage tail cone (though
if I remember, the forward end does extend all the way up into the 
baggage area, the GS ant. is in the right wing-tip and the Txpndr ant.
is in the left wing-tip. In the vernacular of the antenna wonks I 
work with here at Boeing, these antennas are all "Hot" - meaning very
good.

If you can fit it in, for your Com antenna(s) I highly recommend a Bob 
Archer unit - they are also "Hot" and have very low VSWR (a measure of
"goodness" for transmitting antennas) - although they DO kinda look 
like a crumpled-up piece of Aluminum foil you'd throw out after a 
long day of barbequeing. I haven't tried it, but for your Com 2, if 
you can't fit a second Archer unit into your tail-cone, I'd try a 
splitter-coupler so both can use the same antenna. I doubt the 
inherent losses in a coupler would create much of a problem for these 
antennas.

Anyway, Angier, have fun!

Dan Schaefer
N235SP


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