SDR Receiver with a Slinky Antenna
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ต.ค. 2015
- For years now Hams and Shortwave Listeners have been building antennas out of that great American toy: The Slinky. In this video we string two out to form a dipole and hook them up to SDRPlay's RSP software defined receiver. It works pretty good!
- วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
My husband bought an SDR kit and will be trying out the Slinky antenna. Thanks for your informative Video!
Great video, Budd! My wife recently got a bunch of stuff in a get well package from some friends and she was getting ready to throw a slinky away. I grabbed it and she asked, "...just what in the heck are you going to do with that??!" "That's an antenna ready to happen!" told her! :)
Thanks Budd. I'm a beginner here and I like your level of detail of explanation of what you're doing and why you're doing it.
Even Santa uses RTL-SDR. Ho-ho-ho. Merry Cristmas
I found your channel while searching for SDR videos.. You did a great job explaining the SDR! I appreciate the depth of information you provide in your videos. I am now a subscriber. Keep up the great work 73's
What a great intro to SDR! I'm a ham too but have not had much luck with SDRs due to living in a very RF-noisy area. Your presentation is clear and easy to understand. I'm subscribing to your channel. Thanks!
Love your channel. I will stick around and I will have some fun. Love that organ jazz. Thanks for all your hard work.
Great content Bud. Just getting back into DXing after long break. SDR is a revelation. Enjoying your stuff.
Budd, Im retired, software developer, and ham. Also got a decent but old background as a tech, back to the tube days. I MUST try the SDR/slinky! Got a nice mountain near by, Mt. Lemon, would be great to stretch a slinky.
Talk about excited... I definitely subscribed to your stuff!
Got an old van, and no one take haul accept me. Sooo.. mostlikely, the middle or back seats will go, and make room for some camping and ham gear.
BTW, went from north west WA along the coast, down to CA line. Most beautiful vacation I ever had.
Currently working on my HAM ticket now... looking forward to chatting with you! (Currently in Sumner... not far away physically... however faaaaar back in time!) Thanks for the Great Vids!
Thanks for the nice Video and Kings of Regards, from Holland
Thanks for the video. And I'm going for my general test at the Tacoma club next month. Nice to see people who are or were members. Anyways, thanks again for the great idea. KG7QIS, in Buckley Washington, 73
What walks down stairs alone or in pairs and makes a slinkity sound? A spring a spring a marvelous spring! Everyone knows it's sling-key!
Excellent review of another option for antennas. But do you feel that a slinky antenna is any better than just a long wire? Thanks for your videos. thumbs up and shared.
Tom
liked and subscribed! Cool vibe in your videos! I like it ;)
great video
Very educational! Thanks!
400w with a starduster really does your tv in....ahh memories..
very cool
very nice video :)
Greetings, i'm a upcoming ham hailing from HI8. I find your videos very informative and would like for you to keep up the good work. Our local regulations make us become novice before going for technician class, during this short span i'm starting off with SDR, maybe build an antenna (this slinky antenna seems cool!) Any recommendations for a ham on a budget?
What a superb love it DEREK Worcestershire England
Nice video but I'm surprised you didn't have a 2 position coax antenna switch hooked up in there. I am guessing that you could switch back and fourth quickly without hurting anything.
Thankyou Sir for the demo
I am looking for a SDR (with receive & transmit capabilities), very low budget, BTW I have a technician license & possibly try to get next level (general,with in next few years)
the supplied antenna is just enough to prove the SDR is working
Budd, whatever works for you, use it! I'd bet that more Slinkys are purchased by Hams versus kids! :) Great for a quick antenna
installation and fun to experiment with but I'd prefer the Mag-Loop antenna even though they have to be tuned every time you
change a few kilohertz. You can't beat the price and even zipcord can make a good antenna. :)
For most inexperienced users the hardest part of setting up SDR's like this is calibrating the receiver to a known set frequency (i.e. WWV). However, once you do this the first time you won't have to do it again :)
Intersting!
Very interesting video. Would you have video on connecting a descone anttena. Have one on the house it goes to my police scanner.Would like to put splitter inline so i can use for sdr scanning and police scanning? Is this possible?
So is the slinky antenna ur using tecnically a folded dipole?(ends hanging down) or very similar to a beverage antenna?,radio amateurs & enthusiasts will know what i mean :)
Hi Budd, DE k0css Des Moines, Iowa.Curious which SDR were you using? Did I hear SDRplay? Don't recognize the screen. New to SDR rx.
73
Rick k0css
slinky dipoles work great around 3.5mhz
Which software are you using in this video?
What's the rationale behind the geometry of the slinky in relation to antenna principles? I mean, if you replace your span of slinkies with a wire, how does it compare?
Budd - I'm licensed - so - if I use this for scanning - can I transmit with this unit still on - or - will that fry something --- Snortin' Morton
10:04 - Is that the numb-skull net on 14.313 I see?
Can you please suggest a good beginner to all things radio book, just ordered my SDRPlay, there are many holes in my radio knowledge.
>MrACP1911 - like yer moniker - try "Passport to World Band Radio - if yer still lookin' - good luck --- Snortin' Morton
How are you getting the reverb in the audio?
Um, kinda looks like it was made for that! Lol cool!
Has anyone automated SDR for receiving strong signals, and setting the transmitter freqs? And auto detecting the various ham band modes?
The software SDRSharp does that, mode autodetect built-in and switching to strong signals is done with a plugin listed on RTL-SDR website.
Saw a couple of your videos now on SDR, and, well, I just had to order one! Ordered one of the cheap china ones, well it comes 2 for the price of one, or so they say, two antennas, two dongles and that's about it, for about the same price as everyone else is selling one. Hope they work, but I will not hold my breath as I have not had good luck, of late with the cheap china crap. I guess I can't condemn them all, my Boafeng 5Ru works good on 2 meters and 70CM bands when I am in range of a repeater, but sadly where I spend my warm months, here in the middle of South/North Dakota (live on the border) there are no fellow Hams within radio range. The nearest who lived some 26 miles west passed away last year whilst I was safe and warm in Arizona, now down there, you can't throw a rattle snake without hitting a repeater, so if it were not for my mic shyness, I could easily be rag chewing with the best of them. I have been an avid listener to the Short Wave bands since I found an old receiver at our local dump-grounds, (I think I was about 12 or 13 then) a site that my buddies and I used to search weekly for "good stuff" our families being very poor, we could not afford such things as radios or televisions, but we would find broken ones out at the Dump and tinker them back to life. Well the old Olive Drab receiver I found may well have been a bring home from Korea I guess. The antenna's looked like OD tape measures that had no numbers, and the internal battery was an acid lead sealed cell that would take a fair charge after I wired a plug on where the previous owner had thoughtfully removed the old (cord's worth twenty-five cents!) Man I would lay in my bed on the second floor of an ancient house that I deemed ultra modern since it had power, a feature that had been missing on our earlier home in the country when Dad still had the farm, and twiddle those knobs till I could find some station, far away and dream of the day when I could have a ham radio, perhaps build my own, (HEATH KIT - I ordered their Catalog to dream with!) or get real lucky and find a fairly good one at the dump. Well that never happened but I sure did love the idea. I would get old copies of Popular Electronics and Popular Mechanics from a friend who worked at the library, and read every article on Short Wave. Well now I have my technician ticket KE0JBL and a couple of handhelds, the Baofeng and an old Standard C158A Handheld in 2 meter, you can easily tell the difference, while the cheap china radio has way more bells and whistles, it should have it's 20 years newer, that little Standard can talk circles around the china junk, but the cheap China makes a nice scanner down in Arizona, up here in the Dakota's so many folks bought scanners that all the public services are now scrambled, and Statewide police here in SD is running on encoded trunked systems The only time things get interesting on the old law enforcement frequencies is during the rally in Sturgis, then the Sturgis PD grows from 10 to 200 and all the old radios are gathered up and handed out to the officers who come from all over the USA to help with the bikers.
At any rate, thanks much for the video, I guess I am getting old, and way back when I was still really just a kid, Uncle Sam sent me on an all expense paid 1 year vacation to the luscious jungles of Viet Nam. I survived the vacation pretty much intact, except for my hearing that received permanent damage from the gunfire and artillery that saved our asses when the shit hit the fan and Charlie wanted the ground we were walking on at that very moment. So the VA, in all it's generosity has been giving me these little things behind my ears that allow me to hear sort of close to what I could before that wonderful vacation. The nice thing about them, is the modern blue-tooth attachments that come with them. I can now hear my PC though the aides and my wife, who claims that shortwave sounds send chills up her spin, does not have to hear them. OH they also hook to our big screen TV so I no longer bother her when I want to watch FOX News (now that the Democrat who ran the cable company retired and the new guy, a Rush Limbaugh fan took over and offered FN in additional to all the false news channels another action I am so very thankful for, since we could get FOX over the air down in AZ
I would add here, if nobody did yet, that Slinkys are made of plastic as well as metal. Be sure you get the metal ones.
a very good idea we are in 2017 and the youngsters will never ever notice it if not mention
What about VHF and UHF performing?
+Szalony Naukowiec Thanks for the note. This SDR works very well at VHF and UHF. You don't need such a long antenna. You will find that the distances that you are able receive are much shorter at these higher frequencies.
Doesn't a slinky antenna act like a rubber ducks antenna? Being continuosly wound and acting as a trap at frequencies below.
Why didn't you compare the slinky with a standard indoor antenna as what comes in a sdr kit?
Because I want to copy HF short wave stations. The antenna that comes with kit is great for higher frequencies on VHF and UHF but way too short for the lower frequencies in the Amateur HF bands of 20, 40, and 80 meters.
I forgot to mention, I have an SDR and I am looking to get an upconverter for it when I have the finances :-). Right now I am listening to police, fire, and whatnot..
great presentation thanks DE N7KQR
At 15:26, it seams that there is a pretty strong signal right in the middle of your screen but you keep on avoiding it, do you know already what it is.
We call them birdies. It is always in exactly the same place no matter what the band. It is probably interference generated by the computer. Thanks for mentioning it. I should have said something, but I am so used to seeing them that I didn't give it much thought.
+Budd Churchward Thank you for the reply, I have just received my SDRPlay, eventually I would like to get my Ham licence, my kids are into it so it is easy to get wife to approve the expense :-). There is so much to learn and I love your videos, you remind me of grandad and my kids of Santa, can you do more videos for the beginners, anything from Antenna's to how to differentiate between noise and a good signal.
This 'center signal' is something you always find with these type of SDR's. I use an RTL type SDR and they too have this familiar center peak signal. I'm not sure if this is actually a heterodyne or maybe the reference frequency the oscillator is using. As Budd already said, you get used to seeing this when using this type of SDR and you simply disregard it. These kinds of SDR's are cheap yet loads of fun to use.
Us aliens use slinky’s
how much range do you get with slinky antennas vs a normal antenna?
You're Canadian right? Please say yes.
I can see Canada out my window. Is that good enough? I am less than 2 mi. south of the border near Vancouver.
Ha ha I didn’t read that correctly.
I was wondering how stinky could an antenna be? Lol
I'm getting a slinky..
We now have the k3fef sdr in Pensylvania and the kfs web sdr in California as well as many more on line but those are the 2 best, here are the links! Enjoy. Tim, 69.27.184.62:8901/ k3fef.com/
Receive is OK. Does not work well indoors for transmit. Local 40M AM operators said I was three dB above telepathy.
With a slinky for an antenna, I would have thought you would pick up more audio porn! Lol.
Español 🥺 please
PLEASE get rid of that stupid music! My 78 yr. old hearing is nothing to brag about & I couldn't even copy you early in the video.