Made an antenna for my weather radio
During the tornado outbreak in the midwest last week, I discovered that my brand new weather radio had awful reception. The telescopic monopole was inconsistent depending where I would walk in my apartment. The poor reception messed with the SAME headers enough that a severe thunderstorm watch set it off as an "unknown warning". It was also fairly unintelligible with poor SNR.
Looks like garbage, but $20 in parts and an hour of my time was well spent. I'm particularly amazed that the cheap chinesium adapters and ferrites actually worked. If I knew that, I might have spent more time making it look nice. Oh well, I have the parts to make a rev 2.
I threw on ferrites to choke CM currents and keep the feedline from interacting too much... Fine tuning was achieved by coiling the extra length at the ends. According to my Nano VNA, calibrated just before the adapters, this was very close to 73 ohms real j0 ohms imaginary.
Now the reception is rock solid, intelligible and no differences in SNR when walking around.
Next, I should stop procrastinating and get my Ham license.