Cette description était sur le site de SM6PGP, mais le lien a disparu; j'ai mis ci-dessous les éléments que j'avais conservés. (F5AD)
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ALFORD SLOT ANTENNA
The slotted cylinder antenna, Alford Slot, was first
introduced by Andrew Alford in 1946. Its an omnidirectional
horizontally polarized antenna.There are not many descriptions
available, most of them that I have found are based on the work
made by G3JVL in 1978 [Microwave Handbook, M W Dixon G3PFR].
ALFORD SLOT FOR 1.3 GHz
Due to difficulties to get exactly the right dimensions of
materials in the descriptions, I have chosen to use dimensions
easily available in sweden.
Material, aluminum tube 35 mm outer diam (32 mm inner diam.) can
be bought at P&P (Plat & Profile, Metallvaruhuset, in
Gothenburg) I found it suitable to make it 750 mm long, the slot
should be 510 mm long and 7 mm wide. Turn a top cap and a bottom
cap in a lathe and mount a connector preferably a N-type bulkhead
for semi rigid cable UT-141 in the bottom cap. Make the cable so
long that it will reach the middle of the slot and bend it so it
follows the backside of the tube so that it would not disturb the
electrical field in the slot.
Dimensions given in G3JVL/G5YGF/G4KNZ paper
Antenna type Tube
dimensions
Slot width(mm) Slot lenght(mm)
End
fed
31.8 mm OD, 20swg wall
4
510
End
fed
35.0 mm OD, 1.1mm wall
8
510
End
fed
38.1 mm OD, 16swg wall
11
510
Center Fed 31.8 mm
OD, 20swg wall
4
510
Center Fed 35.0 mm
OD, 1.1mm wall
8
510
Center Fed 38.1 mm
OD, 16 swg wall
11
510
I am not using the balun described in the G-land descriptions, I found that an ordinary lambda/2 balun is easier to make, using UT085 coax. Check balun performance before mounting it into the Alford. Mount two 100 ohm SMD resistors (in series) across the 200 ohm side of the balun and check return loss. I found that the impedance in the feeding point of the slot is approx. 200 ohms and somewhat inductive. I placed a small capacitor across the slot to achieve good match, approx. 0,3pF. It is important that the capacitor is of good quality with low loss e.g. ATC100, ATC180 or something with the similar performance from some other manufacturer (dielectric labs). RL of the antenna should be in the range 20 - 30 dB.
RADIATION PATTERN
So far I have built and measured three antennas and all of
them performs as expected. I measured the radiation pattern in my
garden with some simple homemade equipment and a PC. I made a
comparing measurement against a dipole to get some approximation
of the Alford slot antenna gain.
All measurements done at 1296.8 MHz using a VCO (locked to a 13
MHz reference), a logarithmic detector from Analog devices AD8313
connected to an A/D converter. The A/D converter is connected to
the PC parallel port, the antenna rotator is also controlled by
the parallel port.
FINISHED ALFORD SLOT WITH RADOME
REFERENCES
Microwave Handbook Vol. 1, chapt 4.44, M.W. DIXON, G3PFR
The Microwave Newsletter Technical Collection, chapt 1.3, J N
Gannaway, G3YGF & S J Davies, G4KNZ
A novel GPS avionics slot antenna, RF Design august 1996.
Modified 2000-05-27 SM6PGP