What is a flowerpot antenna?
I’ve heard all sorts of answers to this question, most of them completely wrong. A quarter wave aerial, an end-fed aerial, a coaxial ground plane aerial… All incorrect. A flowerpot aerial is nothing more than a cleverly-fed half wave dipole. If you know how a dipole works, then you know how a flowerpot aerial works.
Check the links at the bottom of this page.
A ‘flowerpot’ aerial for 2 metres.
I believe it’s called a flowerpot aerial because someone in the U.S. stuck his in a flower pot and fixed plastic flowers all over it. It’s quite a good stealth antenna! It’s actually a great aerial, and extremely easy to make. Sorry about the photos below, they’re rather blurred. I’ve fixed the tube to a block of wood so I can stand the aerial in the loft. The SWR when holding the aerial at arm’s length is just about 1:1 but the best I can get in the loft is 1.4:1. I’ll have to move some more junk around to keep the aerial in the clear. I built the aerial to use with my Tait radio solely on our local two metre repeater. This saves tying up my main rig.
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- Flower Pot RF Choke
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- Flower Pot 2 metre aerial
The video below shows the construction of a coaxial dipole for the aircraft band.
Link to a very interesting article…
https://gm3sek.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/G3TXQ-RC.pdf
Dimension calculator…
https://nomonsuhendar.blogspot.com/2020/12/flower-pot-antenna-calculator.html