OT: What's This Antenna For?

Jan 31, 2008 11 Replies

Rate this thread:

Saved reading

First reply

hallerb

Probably a amatuer (ham) antenna, having gone to lots of hamfests they have all sorts of wierd antennas on vehicles

DerbyDad03 18 years ago

I was driving behind an old Volvo (early 90's I'd guess) that had a platform on top made from an old fashion bolt-on car top carrier and piece of 3/4 ply almost as big as the roof of the car.

Mounted in the middle of this platform was an antenna, about 12" - 18" tall and shaped kind of like a football standing on end but squattier

- not as round as a basketball, but not as elongated as a football - somewhere in between. It had a solid bar in the middle and 4 curved rods at 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees that gave it it's shape. It appeared to be pretty old, like something from a 60's sci-fi flick.

Anybody know what this style of antenna is used for?

Vote

Information here may be outdated?

hallerb 18 years ago

Probably a amatuer (ham) antenna, having gone to lots of hamfests they have all sorts of wierd antennas on vehicles

Vote

Sanity 18 years ago

Early 90's? UFO contact.

Vote

Roemax 18 years ago

Vote

Pete C. 18 years ago

What was the call sign on the license plate?

Vote

Davej 18 years ago

Maybe it was some sort of old fashioned or homebrew GPS antenna.

Vote

Oren 18 years ago

That just changed my day. All this time I thought a hamfest was about food:)

Oren

Vote

dicko 18 years ago

It could have been an eggbeater antenna....

-dickm

Vote

HeyBub 18 years ago

Directional locator for unauthorized spy transmitters.

You see 'em all the time used by the Gestapo in WW2 movies. You've probably got terrorists in your neighborhood.

Vote

Roger Grady 18 years ago

It sounds like a quadrafilar helix, for somewhere around the 2 meter (144-148Mhz) ham band. It's an antenna that produces circular polarization and is omnidirectional, useful for receiving signals from satellites. There are amateur radio satellites that operate in the 2m band, or it might have been to receive weather satellite pictures at around 137 Mhz.

The same type of antenna is commonly used for GPS receivers but because the GPS system operates at a much higher frequency, the antennas are only a few inches long.

Roger Grady snipped-for-privacy@sbcglobal.qlfit.net To reply by email, remove "qlfit." from address

Vote