Aluminum tube colinear.

[mrschultz2]

I've tried a bunch of antenna designs over the last 6 months or so and kept going back to my coax colinear, until now.

I had picked up some 1/2 inch aluminum tube to try the 5/8 wave design, when that fell short of the coax colinear I set it aside, last week I thought of using that tubing for a 1/2 wave colinear.  I had enough tubing for 6 segments, I designed and 3D printed spacers that would feed copper wire down the center of each segment and connect it to the aluminum tubing.

It works very well, increased my range about 50 miles for aircraft over 30,000 feet, and I can now sometimes track planes on the ground at KPHL, if I had this outside the attic it would rock.

Picture of it in the attic:


CAD image of the spacer:

[Anmer]

Thanks for sharing.

Where do the spacers go?

[mrschultz2]

Here's a quick diagram of how the spacers work in between each segment of Aluminum tubing:

[Anmer]

Thanks.  It's what I thought but wanted to be sure.