Best Antenna Type for 1080 Mhz?

Whip Antenna Length And Frequency Calculator

Short and stubby seems to work.

"Short and stubby seems to work."

Lyn, you're killin' me here! This one is almost too easy.

But, I promised to be a good boy and stop cut back on the wisecracks.

Taking the high road, eh?

There is a well known old Germany saying which may help further:-

Short and thick, ladies luck,

Long and thin, ladies pain......

Here is a antenna you can buy, but if you have some coax with the right connector you can make one yourself.

For 1080 MHz each half of the antenna is 2.625" long.

For ground plane antennas, 5/8 wave gives the best gain. There are many plans on the web.

An l/4 (quarter wave) vertical whip will have a good hemispherical coverage. The longer ones squeeze the radiation more and more toward the horizontal, hence they reach further. At the same time their loading impedances are widely different, and the transmitter may not like it. The remedy is a 2 or 3dB in-line pad at the transmitter output. It eats up a bit of power, but by providing always close to 75 Ohms, it makes it up by the good matching of simply any good old vertical. You find the pad in any decent electronic catalogue.

It depends on what level of directionality is needed in the antenna.

As I recall you are using this for some type of surveillance system. In that case, as PWS suggests, you need a directional antenna to concentrate as much rf energy as possible in the direction of the receiving antenna. They both should be yagis pointed at each other, consult the ARRL Antenna Handbook for construction details.

Whatever does the job is the best answer but might be fun to try a helix for gain and directivity. See: http://jcoppens.com/ant/helix/calc.en.php

A simple coaxial dipole might be easiest to make just pull the shield back over a piece of small coax. Make the shield length and the length of the exposed center conductor each a quarter wavelength. See:http://www.hamuniverse.com/vertbazooka.html

Good luck and have fun.