DIY antennas has always been relevant for beginner radio amateurs. Once it was limited to TV antennas. Now antennas for digital communication have been added to them - Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G, etc. The need to make such an antenna is in summer cottages, in small towns and villages, where a cellular operator is sometimes the only available Internet service provider. However, the signal level of the base station sometimes leaves much to be desired, sometimes the question becomes: is it possible getting signal from this cell tower at all? But residents of large cities also have to face the problem of making an antenna by himselfs. Indeed, very often the price of such an antenna is comparable to the cost of the modem itself, and on your own such an antenna can be made just from available materials.
On the network, you can already find enough information about the independent making of homebrew antennas for Wi-Fi, 4G and other digital radio networks. However, often these articles are written by people who has a poor eye in the subject. A radio amateur who is going to make an antenna by himself should be very critical of the design descriptions published on the Web. Unfortunately, too often there are not only designs that are far from optimal, but also ones that cannot work in principle (at least they cannot work as promised). How can a novice radio amateur, poorly versed in theory, distinguish truth from fiction? First of all, you need to understand the following:
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There are no special antennas for 4G or Wi-Fi. The principles of construction and the parameters by which the antenna is evaluated are the same for any type of radio communication, only the requirements for these parameters differ.
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The gain of the antenna directly depends on its dimensions (or rather, the ratio of dimensions to the wavelength), so publications like: “an antenna from beer cans catches better than an industrial one with an amplifier” should be immediately dismissed and not wasted time
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You will not be able to assemble, for example, a band-pass filter without further tuning, but everyone can assemble a crystal receiver according to the description. The same applies to antennas. The design repeatability factor for a homemade antenna is a priority. Without tuning, at least according to the SWR meter, it is almost impossible to achieve a gain of more than 9-11 dBi for a DIY antenna. Do not try to make complex multi-element designs, you will only lose time and money that you would like to save.
This site is intended to help a beginner radio amateur come to know how to make an antenna by himself. It is still difficult to do without a minimum of theory. One must at least have an idea of what a dipole is, as well as the conditions for the propagation of radio waves. However, we will try to do without complex formulas.
Trained radio amateurs can find on the site apps and files for calculation. On the site you will find a large selection of online calculators for calculating antennas of a wide variety of designs, as well as calculators for calculations related to the design of antennas and RF transmission lines.
It is up to you to decide which design of a homemade antenna to choose based on the requirements in your particular case, the availability of materials for the antenna making, the a
bility to work with your hands and head. In most cases, the use of a directional antenna for a digital network allows you to achieve the maximum data exchange rate where there was nothing to do without an antenna. But omnidirectional antennas also provide a significant increase in the speed and reliability of communication, especially in urban areas.
