I got tired of the shit performance of the printed circuit board antenna for test use, so I decided to make a QWGP antenna that I could maybe also use for cheap give away ADS-B feeders. Behold: Boris The Spider. Made from an F-81L L-Band rated F barrel, a 3/8" copper or brass washer, 8 AWG hard drawn copper wire (it doesn’t bend easily) and a bit of RG-6 with the shield removed, shrink tubing and some teats from all of the SMA shit lying around. Boris the Spider (1090 MHz ADS-B antenna) is coming soon in quantity. Today, I finished my jigs to take out a lot of time and labor. The jig now has a reel for 50’ rolls of copper wire. The reel spool is tool less, and has a drag knob and a removeable flange, so the wire is just dropped onto the spool, tightened down on dropped onto the support and wing nutted into place. The wire goes through a straitening section (also adjustable without tools and that feeds it into a shear with a circular hole until it hits the stop block that sets a repeatable length. The new shear (as opposed to other cutting measures I tried) is so clean, I don’t have to file or grind the ends to get rid of “pinches” common to other cutting methods.
Let me know if you need some inexpensive alternate for the crap PCB antennas! More detail and instructions are attached here.
Boris Instruction V7.pdf (1.9 MB)
