<antirez>

ADS-B wine cork antenna

antirez 2269 days ago. 283404 views.

# Software defined radio is cool

About one week ago I received my RTLSDR dongle, entering the already copious crew of
software defined radio enthusiasts.

It's really a lot of fun, for instance from my home that is at about 10 km from the Catan
Airport I can listen the tower talking with the aircrafts in the 118.700 Mhz frequency wi
AM modulation, however because of lack of time I was not able to explore this further unt
the past Sunday.

My Sunday goal was to use
from the aircrafts lading
that is installed in most
like this. Every aircraft
forth.
the RTLSDR to see if I was able to capture some ADS-B message
or leaving from the airport. Basically ADS-B is a security devi
aircrafts that is used for collision avoidance and other stuff
broadcasts informations about heading, speed, altitude and so

With software defined radio there are a lot of programs in order to demodulate this
information (that is encoded in a fairly simple to decode format). I use "modes_rx" that
free software, just Google for it.

However this transmissions happen in the 1090 Mhz frequency. My toy antenna nor other
rabbit ears antennas I had at home worked at all for this frequency, so I read a few thin
on Google and tried a simple design that actually works well and takes 10 minutes to buil
using just a bit of wire and a wine cork.

# Cork wine dipole antenna

Sorry but I know almost nothing about antennas. However I'll try to provide you the
informations I've about the theoretical aspects of this antenna.

Technically speaking this antenna is an Half Wavelength Dipole. In practical terms it is

two pieces aligned parallel wires with a small space between them, with a total length th
is half the wavelength of the frequency I want to listen to.

Speed of light = 300 000 000 meters per second

Frequency I want to listen to = 1090 Mhz, that is, 1090 000 000 Hertz
Wavelength at frequency = 300 000 000 / 1090 000 000 = 275 millimeters.

The half of 275 millimeters is 137 millimeters more or less, so this is the length of our
antenna:
Now you can ask, why half the wavelength? But even for a n00b like me this actually makes
lot of sense, look at this:

Basically if you imagine a sinusoidal wave, when one of the two pieces of the antenna is
invested by the *high* part of the wave, the other is in the *low* side, and I guess that
for induction this creates the current.

Ok, end of broscience for today.

# How to build it

Simply take two pieces of wire of 10 centimeters each, and insert then into the cork. The
blend the two wires to emulate the design in the picture trying to make the space between
the two wires small enough. Finally cut the two wires so that they are more or less the
same length, and for a total of 137 millimeters.

In the other side of the cork I connected my two wires that go to the RTLSDR. I'm so lazy
that I not even soldered the wires... You probably should!

Finally the two connected wires go to a PAL-style connector like this:

That in turn is connected with an adapter for the much smaller connector in the RTLSDR US
dongle. Even with all this interruptions along the path I can receive many aircrafts like
boss, even from indoor, like this:

(-51 0.0000000000) Type 17 BDS0,9-1 (track report) from 3c6313 with velocity 299kt headin
129 VS -320
(-49 0.0000000000) Type 17 BDS0,5 (position report) from 3c6313 at (37.500388, 15.005891)
at 9300ft
(-51 0.0000000000) Type 11 (all call reply) from 3c6313 in reply to interrogator 0 with
capability level 6
(-51 0.0000000000) Type 17 BDS0,9-1 (track report) from 3c6313 with velocity 298kt headin
129 VS -320
(-51 0.0000000000) Type 17 BDS0,5 (position report) from 3c6313 at (37.499863, 15.006681)
at 9300ft

... And so forth.

Have fun! And if you have tricks to make the antenna better while retaining the simplicit
please let me know.

12 Comments antirez weblog 

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oustar • 6 years ago

My test antenna is even easier :D

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Dmitry Gorin • 6 years ago

You done a great job with making a simple, but effective antenna! Thank you for the post. There is a way to impro
it:

What you have build most likely has an Rf impedance of around 300 Ohm and you want to try a baloon adapter
300/75 Ohm in between your cork antennae and the cable. It looks like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Produ...

or this:http://compare.ebay.com/lik...

Good Luck!

- Dmitry
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--Magne > Dmitry Gorin • 6 years ago

No - the impedance of a half-wave dipole is around 72 ohms (a folded dipole has ~300 ohms), so this is
plenty good enough.
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wind_bender > --Magne • 6 years ago

Yes, impedance is good. But a balanced antenna hooked to coax feedline, means that the outershel
the feedline will radiate near the antenna. So the purpose of a balun, would be to block the current
trying to come back down the outer shell of the feedline, and messin with the notion of the nice
 balanced radiator. Google it!
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Steve Gorzo > wind_bender • 5 years ago

This is a receive only device, it is not radiating.
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Crossfire Hurricane Conspiracy > Steve Gorzo • 5 years ago

How does being a 'receive' antenna make any difference? Seems like, if an antenna does a
poor job when transmitting, it's going to do a poor job of receiving too.

I've considered using a 75-300 TV balun for a 1090 mHz folded dipole, but I'm not sure if t
will work all the way up to 1.09 gHz...
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Phelps > Crossfire Hurricane Conspiracy • 5 years ago

Receiving is a different application with fewer tradeoffs. That's why I'm going to do the sam
thing, but with a full-wave dipole. There's no reflected voltage to worry about on a receive o
antenna, so the impedance matching is different. A full wave antenna is going to capture
weaker signals.

That's why Beverage antennas are absolute champs at DX reception, but are just as absolut
terrible for transmitting. It's not hard to see why people don't think about this -- number on
your logic is seductive, and number two, there's very little published on receive antennas, a
pretty much anyone not buying rabbit ears off the shelf for the TV is more worried about
transmitting properly.
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Crossfire Hurricane Conspiracy > Phelps • 5 years ago

I once had a job building, turning and testing microwave antennas.
Also have some experience in Ham Radio and L-band radio astronomy(hobby).
Just about every 'receive' antenna I've ever tested or used had a good SWR (or a good -15 to
-20 dB return loss).

No one I worked for would accept a receive antenna that didn't have a good match to the fe
line.. If it has a poor match, the losses are the same in receive and in transmit.
I don't think anyone would buy a 1090 antenna with a 3:1 SWR..
Thumbnail

However, high power in the aircraft can over-come a lot of loss..

I connected an attenuator between my 1090 (9dbi) antenna & dongle,
and found that I could crank in 10 db of loss and still hear planes at the same range..It mad
almost no difference. That's cutting the signal to about 1/tenth.
After inserting 15db of loss, I could see the range drop off badly..
At 20 dB of loss (1/100 of normal signal), I could only hear the close in planes.. IIRC that w
out to about 50 to 75 nm..
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Walter Hynson • 2 years ago

thanks for the info
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Ted Dunning • 5 years ago

 If you extend the feed lines a bit, you can create a balun for free. This may explain partly why your antenna is
performing better than a classic dipole with unbalanced feed.

Here is a diagram showing where the you inadvertently created the Balun. See http://home.earthlink.net/~... for
more info.

To make this work, you will need to adjust spacing to make the transmission line have a reasonable characteristic
impedance.

Impedance as low as 70 ohms can be achieved with balanced lines by making the distance between the conductor
very small. A center-to-center distance of 1.25 times the wire diameter should give you about 70 ohms. The cork w
change this a bit, but my guess is that the relative permittivity should be about 1.5 according to this:
http://www.cs.odu.edu/~mln/...

see more

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Sam • 5 years ago

Just awsome !
Thanks !
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Samrat Man Singh • 6 years ago

Hey, you might want to add <pubdate> to items in your feed. Your older posts just keep showing up on my feed
reader.
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