How to built DIY Cloverleaf and Skew-Planar Wheel antennas for 5.8GHz and what kind of results can you expect.
The video shows the way I build a Skew-Planar Wheel antenna. I use exactly the same technique to build Cloverleaf antennas (with only 3 lobes). The built techniques follows the very good tutorials on RCExplorer.
Specifics of 5.8GHz
There higher the frequency, the smaller the antennas and the lower is the tolerance when making it. At 5.8GHz very small difference in the build (a few tenth of a millimeter) can have a large impact on how good the antenna is. That makes building such antennas more challenging at 5.8GHz then for lower frequencies.
Basically, it is not possible to reliably build optimal 5.8GHz antennas if you do not have equipment to check them and properly tune them. However, it is fairly easy to build "less than perfect" antennas which already provide great benefits over the stock antennas we get with our FPV systems.
The video show how to build such a "non-tuned" antenna. It is easy and does not require any specific or expensive equipment. I have been flying with these antennas and they work quite good. The reason why they work even without tuning is that these type of antennas are actually quite wide band.
Using "non-tuned" antennas like these is a good way to get started and have the benefits of circular polarization at a very low cost. Later you can decide to get better tuned antennas either by tuning them yourself (which requires some expensive tools) or just by buying a pair of tuned antennas from a specialist.
To give an idea of what is the impact of tuning these antennas, with a 200mW system non-tuned DIY antennas are giving me a range of 500m to 1km. With antennas tuned to a specific channel I think that people get about twice that range.
If you still need to be convinced that these type of antenna is the way to go, have a look at my previous article in which I compared a these non-tuned CP antennas to the stock antennas.
Hope you find these info useful!
Leave comments if you have any questions (or if you think something is wrong, I am not an expert at all :-).
Cheers,
Franck
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