[amsat-bb] Re: EggBeater II antennas

[Oscar Diez]

Hi Jeff,

I would not swap your 6 el. Yagi for any eggbeater (neither the original M2
one nor the homebrewed eggbeater II design).

I've build an Eggbeater II and it was very "nully" due to the many lobes of
the antenna. I had it mounted about 20ft over the ground on the roof top and
connected to a low noise GAsFET preamp. I removed it again after only one
week of operation and was quite disappointed and went back to my homebrew
ground plane.

Furthermore the antenna is only circular overhead and horizontally polarized
towards the horizon. Even the simple 1/4 wave groundplane + preamp gave me a
better reception of 70cm LEO birds at low elevation angles and much less
nulls. 

Generally I found vertical polarisation to work better most of the times
with most kind of satellites (although by theory when receiving circular
signals this shouldn't be the case - but you can centrainly confirm that
with your yagi) 

If you look for an omnidirectional antenna I would give the parasitic
lindenbald antenna a try as described by Tony AA2TX in the AMSAT proceedings
2006 and 2007. I haven't tried it yet, but I expect it to work even better
than any Eggbeater design (maybe someone ever compared such antenna types
and could report here?)

Best 73,

Oscar DJ0MY