Love how the thumbnail looks like a missile crashed into a street sign

im Czech and i was surprised my language showed up so i translated it 15:29 czech translation: when you get coffee take me with you we will do it immediately

Your antenna isn't camouflaged, but it has the added bonus of making the enemy take a wrong turn off a cliff like Wile E Coyote.

Funny, "Which ever country we are invading for their oil this week."

Our OE-4703 broke in the field some years ago. I made a new one out of a pizza box and two cans of monster. I cut off the end of one of them so I could slip it over the other to make a longer element. Then I cut up a redbull can to make some petals that I stapled to the box. Ran some slash wire around it and used a cobra head to connect it to our Golf. Ended up getting a better RSSI than the actual antenna lol

Those Brazilian pirates on some cowboy bebop shi lmfao

This is one of your best videos imo. Just the right amount of background, diy, and not too short.

This is the perfect 'Save It For Parts' video, just enough information, just the right length, plus a bit of humour.

Old hat here, I like this channel because he's not trying to pretend he's doing something he's not. When something is 'reported info', he flags it as such. When is dipole failed he didn't claim it did. He's not giving people false hope or engage in fear mongering. As someone who's been in SDRs since day one, honesty is what keep me coming to this channel.

Hey Gabe.
Another video that takes me back a few years.
I started out in Germany around 1990 with a Stabo handheld CB radio. I quickly switched to "good radios" aka President Lincoln (V1), and used them (registered but without an amateur radio license) with their higher output power (4 watts FM, 40 channels, and 1 watt AM, 12 channels were permitted).
This Lincoln had a 10 watt output (21 watt PEP).
The problem is... In Germany, this made me liable to prosecution, and if I had a new antenna with poor SWR, I sometimes even killed the TV reception of my neighbors 20 houses away...
Luckily, they always called my parents first before contacting the authorities.

Building antennas was allways "magic" to me. I'd read the instructions, build it, and somehow the thing would work. The SWR was always acceptable, too. I never really understood it.

Thanks for your videos. I love your way of working.
It reminds me of myself. I once took apart my parents' awesome "copies everything" VHS recorder to see why it could copy movies from the video store but mine in my room couldn't. My parents weren't thrilled :-D

Please just keep doing what you're doing and stay the way you are.

Edit:
"Tactical bricks" should become an official term for securing things against falling over!

Lighting better now.

I always love this kind of projects. Just imagine spending a lot of money in an antenna and then some random guy do the same with just trash. It's amazing.

On the first radio broadcast, one brazilian trucker is complaining that they are making him wait in the truck loaded with oranges to his destination in the northeast of Brazil.

If it flies over my country, it's our airwaves

Absolutely one of your best videos for information, construction,  overall content and presentation.   I'll be heading to the hardware store as soon as the thaw arrives.

Your channel reminds me of old school YouTube where everything was more personal and less brain-rotty. Thank you, and please don’t change. 73 from Mississippi.

Ughhh, why do you have to post videos, just as I am off to bed as it's late 😂.  Gawd man. Love your vids but they get my brain going and I can't shut off (Ohh I gotta give that a try, Ohh ohh ohh)  

Keep up the fantastic vids... anytime 😉

Its always better to make an antenna than to buy one !  And its always cheaper!  I miss monitoring time and popular communications  magazines.   I have to say that SDRs have made our radio hobby so much more fun and affordable and approachable  ( dont need lots of specialized equipment- great for experimental fields) This is fantastic! I really enjoy your channel! Keep going ! This is the real amateur radio spirit) well done  lad!

Gabe is a genius. Seriously, a genius.

6:28 RF engineer here.

There are 2 kinds of splitters.

Resistive splitters are broadband, usually operate all the way down to DC, and dissipate half of the power resistively as heat.

Then there are microwave splitters (often called hybrids or couplers) which use capacitive or inductive elements (see rat-race coupler) and are tuned to a narrow frequency range (typically no more than a couple decades). They typically dissipate little to no power, so the sum total of the power at the output ports is nearly equal to the input power, less the trace loss and connector loss. Of the variety of microwave coupler/splitter/divider/combiner/hybrid designs, some split power equally between the ports while others split power unequally. And importantly for your application, some have a phase shift between the output ports (commonly 90 or 180 degrees at the designed frequency), while others have no phase shift between the output ports. Ignoring velocity factor, your 10cm phasing network provides a 90 degree phase shift at 750MHz or a 180 degree phase shift at 1.5 GHz. If the coupler also provides a phase shift, then you're not getting the intended phase difference between the 2 wings of the X. If you've got a power splitter from the junk bin and you know what the phase difference is (based on the datasheet or you have a way to measure with a VNA or high frequency signal generator and oscilloscope), then you can adjust your coax cable lengths accordingly. Microwave splitters do NOT operate down to DC, so you won't see continuity with a multimeter because the multimeter uses a DC signal to measure.

If you measure a splitter with a multimeter and get  <200 ohms, most likely it's a resistive splitter and you're losing half of your power inside the splitter as heat, with the remaining power divided (usually equally) between the 2 output ports. Therefore you're getting only 25% of the input signal at each output port.

If you have a power splitter that's high impedance, it's likely a microwave splitter.

Hope that helps.

The first splitter that you used, with the orange label, has the markings -3.5 dB on each output port. This means that this is a microwave splitter with 0.5 dB of insertion loss in addition to the 3 dB splitting factor of an ideal splitter. This coupler is a low-loss coupler, which dissipates just 11% of the incoming signal, far better than the 2nd coupler you used that had a low resistance on the multimeter (resistive splitter) and dissipates 50% of the incoming signal as heat. However it's very likely that the phase difference between the 2 outputs of the 1st coupler wasn't 0 degrees. You'd need to use different cable lengths, which you could either find experimentally or measuring with a VNA. Best case scenario, the coupler provides a 90 degree phase difference at the target frequency and you use equal length coax cables. That's assuming the phase difference for the microwave splitter is well behaved (more or less constant) over the frequency range you plan on using it with. The 2 outputs of the TV coaxial splitter were likely never intended on being recombined in a device, so the design didn't need to optimize for well-behaved phase difference between the outputs.

See https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/couplers-and-splitters