My 6 Meter / 50Mhz Antenna build

I watched a YouTube video by Randy, K7AGE, where he talked about building a 6 meter dipole. This super simple antenna is so easy that I would have to find an excuse to NOT make it. Randy’s video (and many others on the net) made me want to try it out and I wanted to play on “the magic” band. After a few minutes of thinking I jumped in with two feet and started looking for 6 meter yagi antenna designs. I stumbled onto the YU7EF EF0604s antenna.

This antenna is a simple 4 element beam that is relatively compact, the longest element is just over 9ft and the boom is only 8ft! I started off wanting to make this antenna portable, however after drawing up the design I visited my favorite metal retailer for some aluminum tubing and discovered that they did not carry the sizes that I needed to make the elements telescopic. I ended up settling on single lengths of 3/4inch aluminum tubing with 1/16th inch walls for the elements. The boom is an 8ft piece of 1inch square aluminum tubing. The elements are held to the beam using hydraulic hose clamps. The boom is mounted to a pole using a pair of pipe/exhaust clamps which are bolted to a 4inch square plate of 1/8th inch think aluminum.

I posted the pictures from the build and testing phase via Google+

Click here do download the PDF sketch of the visio drawing I did:

Click for PDF

Visio mapping of the antenna. Click to download the PDF

The beam as dusk