Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I'm going to talk about dipoles. You know the tried and true antenna, the go-to design for getting on air, the simple first antenna you ever make, the one you learn from, you know the one. It's the mainstay of every amateur, of any field-day, of all things Amateur Radio. It's a simple thing. Using metric, rather than imperial measurements, but the point stands, you use the speed of light in vacuum divided by the required operating frequency and you get the overall wave length for that frequency. In absolute terms, roughly 300 m/s divided by 50 MHz, gives you 6 meters. Surprise, that's the band name for 50 MHz. Now the dipole is a half-wave contraption, so, 6 meters divided by 2 gives you 3 meters for your total half-wave dipole. Each leg is half that, a quarter wave length, so you have 3 meters divided by 2 again and you end up with two bits of wire, a meter and a half long each. If you're following along, that's 300 divided by 50 divided by 2 divided by 2, or using the