The other day I was in HRO and scanning for some reading material for the long weekend. I ran across Brian Cake’s new book, The ARRL Antenna Designer’s Notebook. A brief skim of it showed that it actually covered a couple of interesting antenna types which I had never heard of: the Box Kite Yagi and the Twin C antenna and some brief forays into other topics, including ground planes and small transmitting loops.

About half the book is dedicated to the Box Kite Yagi, which are basically a collection of Yagi antennas which are carefully designed to optimize gain relative to previous state of the art Yagi antennas. For instance, a six element 2m Boxkite has a boom length of approximately 85 inches, and has a gain of approximately 14.6dBi. If I try to make a 144Mhz Yagi using DL6WU’s classic long Yagi design and with similar gain, I end up with a boom 427 inches long (almost five times as long). I frankly am not experienced enough at antenna design to understand the tradeoffs involved here, or whether there (say) the box kite is more sensitive to fabrication errors, but reducing the overall boom length to such a dramatic degree is very interesting. He also has designs for interesting dual band designs, such as a small 6m/2m yagi that has around a 7 foot boom. Very nice, and thought provoking. I’m wondering whether an antenna like this aimed toward the moon rise/set positions would enable me to receive JT65 EME transmissions. Very neat.

I’m also quite interested in the “C-pole” antenna design. It’s a short vertical antenna which has very good low angle takeoff, and requires no radial system. There was an article about them in QST a while back, but a lot more details in the book.

Some of the more thought provoking antenna design notes I’ve seen in a while. I am glad I picked it up.