3 Element Yagi-Uda Antenna for 14MHz

Our club had recently received excellent HF Sets. In spite of having such good sets we suffered from bad reception because of unavailability of a good antenna. Keeping this in mind we decided to take up a project to build a 3 element yagi-uda antenna. We formed a small team and adopted a teach ourselves policy as all of us had little knowledge about antenna fundamentals. After about a month of classroom sessions we were able to design and finalise on a 3-element yagi-uda antenna. Selecting and ordering of the material and the bureaucracy involved took about a month and a half. Finally the material having arrived we started with the assembling. It took us one day for cutting the materials and 3 days for assembling, tuning and erecting the antenna. A yagi-uda is a high gain directional antenna. The antennae, which we locally see for televisions belong to this group. But the length of the elements used for this purpose is small as the frequency at which they operate is high (GHz). The length is directly proportional to the wavelength. The most widely used band for the Amateur radio in India is the 20m band i.e. 14.0MHz to 14.350MHz. Hence, we decided to build the antenna tuned for 14.19MHz, so that its performance would be good for the complete band. The length of elements for this band would approximately span 35 feet.

Design:
There are few software available for designing the yagi. We made use of Yagi Analyser. We need to feed in the data like: the frequency, the number of elements, the spacing, the radius of each elements, etc. and it calculates the performance of the antenna. Not just that it can also plot the radiation pattern for a particular frequency. However, these element lengths are approximate estimations as for the actual antenna there would be many parasitic elements altering the performance. The output of the finalized design is shown below:

The material used is aluminium pipes. The maximum length of the pipe available is 12ft and hence the complete elements could be formed only by telescoping the pipes.

For this purpose, four different diameter pipes were chosen. A V shaped cut was made at the end of the outer pipe along the axis as shown in fig. 1. The smaller pipe was fastened to this by using two hose clips as shown.

Once the elements are assembled, they need to be fixed with the boom. The boom is the main supporting element for the antenna made of Aluminium. This is done using U bolts as shown in fig. 2. The Boom is similarly fixed with the mast.

The center element is called the Driven as the signal is feed to this element. But before feeding, matching of the impedance is very important for complete power transfer.

The advent of the other two elements decreases the effective impedance of the antenna. Different type of matching techniques are available, one of which is the Gamma Match. The assembly for the gamma match is shown in fig. 3. By changing the capacitance and the feed point the impedance can be matched effectively so as to get the standing wave ratio (SWR) near to 1. A SWR between 1 1.5 is considered good.

The Capacitor is made using two aluminium pipes of different diameter with a dielectric layer between the two. A Mylar film is used as a dielectric.

Tuning:
Every element resonates for a particular frequency. Tuning of elements refers to adjusting the length of each element. The driven element is tuned first using a Dip Meter. This meter contains an oscillator and a coupling coil, which is used to couple the signal to the element. Whenever the element resonates the impedance decreases and the meter shows a dip. The length of the element is adjusted such that the dip appears at about 14.09 MHz. This was done because while tuning, the antenna was fixed at about 8feet from the ground. It was anticipated that once the antenna was fixed on top of the tower i.e. 8m above ground, it would automatically get tuned to near 14.19MHz. This detuning occurs because of the proximity of ground. Once the element is tuned for a particular frequency, the gamma capacitor is adjusted to get a SWR near to 1. Next is the tuning of the reflector. The antenna is rotated such that it points exactly opposite to some transmitted signal. This can be obtained by requesting one of the Hams to transmit a continuous carrier signal. The reflector length is adjusted till the signal can no longer be received. The antenna is again rotated such that it now points in the direction of the signal and now the director length is adjusted till the signal strength increases to maximum. Once this is done, the Yagi uda is tuned and ready for operation.

The complete assembly is shown in the figure:

This has been a major achievement for our club and I hope that there will be many more such projects undertaken in future

Parag Deotare (Secretary, COEP Amateur Radio Club) 2002-03

The Yagi Team:

Aditi Vadnagare Aniket Rane Hari KrishnaPrakash Hemant Chavan Madhura Sane Nakul Bhangadia Neeti Gore Nirupama Zambre Parag Deotare Prashant Baldawa Rujuta Kulkarni Sushrut Pavanaskar

Reference:
The ARRL Antenna Book