Originally posted by fungus
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Originally posted by Even92LN
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The problem with this thread is that there is no such thing as a "Best Antenna"! What is considered best is very subjective and strongly depends on your expectations you have from your antenna.
Examples:
1) A person who is living in front of a mountain,, have little use of "omni-directional" antenna if more than half the sky of LOS is missing. For him/her the best choice would be something that has a direction, like a patch-dish.
2) A person living in an apartment who does not have access to mounting anything on the outside, may be better off with a more compact antenna based on a PCB-strip.
3) While someone in a house with their own aerial tower, can use a much larger and heavier antenna.
4) Someone in a car, traveling or using their phone to scan the skies, may want something ultra portable.
The problem with buying an antenna is that the sellers always assume you know what you're doing. They rarely state clearly (at least for a non RF engineer) under what conditions a particular antenna is good for, or any other requirements regarding expected gain and recommended feed-line and mounting.
But if you just wanna play around with Flightradar / ADS-B stuff for a few days to get a few airplanes logged, you can try something like these:
*Ultra simple wine-cork dipole:
*Dangling wire!
* (These probably need a 1:1 75-to-75 Ohm Balun transformer.)
The problem with these are that they rely on the feed-line as being part on the antenna! You will simply not know if they work until you try with your own setup.
Cheers!
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