tld:
Quick question you might have a good answer to, based on your antenna experience–
Can I adapt a normal AM ferrit+coil antenna to lower frequenzies, such as 150 - 300kHz?
Would I get decent results, or am I better off looking for a different (longer?) ferrit rod, and winding the coil myself?
Also, is there any best practice for getting such a thing hooked up to a BNC connector?
Terje
leon_heller:
You’d be better off winding a new antenna from scratch, or replace the old winding. It will need to be tuned with a suitable capacitor, and you should use a low-impedance link winding for coupling to the BNC input, which is, presumably, 50 ohms. The inductance and number of turns should be calculated, ideally, but about 20 turns should be OK. You can optimise it when you get it working.
leon_heller:
EDIT: I look for harmonics with my 20 GHz SA. You might not have thought about it, but spurious harmonics cause problems for others and drain your battery…
(quoting from other thread, to move the AM antenna-stuff here)
I’ve been spending time chasing down and confirming/deconfirming harmonics after the the authorities litterally came knocking at a customers door at a previous job, so keenly aware of them. (I was before then as well).
So far I’ll be receiving only, so I’m somewhat less panicy.
What I’m looking to do now is read a phase shift signal through a wire. I’ve been assuming a ferrit+coil might be better than a loop antenna due to smaller size?
For hooking up to the receiver, is there any reason I can’t harvest BNC connector and low impedance cabling from a cheap oscilloscope probe? (about $6, which is what I’d expect to pay locally for just the plug, and it’d save me from having to terminate the cable… Being old enough to have suffered through coax networking, I could die happily not terminating another bnc…)
(I was before then as well).