Dual-band antenna?

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

Since it looks like FlightAware discontinued their 978/1090 dual-band antenna, does anyone know of any other outdoor 978/1090 antennas? Or know what the bandwidth of the FlightAware 5.5dBi antenna is?

2

DPD has 978 and 1090 Mhz Antennas

A wideband “Discone” antenna would work but has a huge bandwidth and little gain.

3

Yes, they have 1090 and 978 monoband antennas, but doubling up on antennas at $150 each (and then double the coax or double the diplexers) isn’t what I’m looking for. I’d like a single dual-band antenna that I can split to two receivers via a power divider or diplexer.

4

The loss and extra noise from each device may not be worth it.
If you were closer, I would give you mine(FA Dual band).

5

According to my antenna analyzer the FA may work reasonably well at 978, not ideal, but not deaf.

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6

It’ll work, but the test performed by the RTL-SDR Blog showed a 10:1 SWR at 978, as opposed to 1.15:1 on 1090.

7

Better than that on my analyzer, it fell into one of a number of dips in VSWR the antenna has.

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8

@ExplodingLemur

Whilst browsing around rtl-sdr.com I came across this. https://www.rtl-sdr.com/stratux-1090-mhz-978-mhz-diplexer-now-available/

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9

Comments are not good on that one.

If you are serious about 1090 MHz range, sharing the antenna won’t fly.

Best solution is probably to just build yourself an 978 MHz antenna.
Maybe a quick spider directly on top of some RG6 coax that’s not too expensive.
Or this antenna might be wide enough in bandwidth due to the design: https://www.ebay.de/itm/1pcs-ADS-B-PCB-Antenna-1090MHz-Antenna-SMA-female-Antenne-CASE/253915016420

Before sharing the antenna i’d go for a 978 MHz indoor antenna to be honest.

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10

I don’t intend to have a 978Mhz system as I’m in the UK. Just pointing out to ExplodingLemur that the diplexer he wanted is now available.

Thanks for all the programming work you are doing.:+1:

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11

Yeah, I saw that one. It looks like it’s a 3dB divider with a pair of SAW filters (which add their own 1-2dB insertion loss on top of that). I’m not sure you can call it a diplexer as much as a filtered splitter.
FlightAware does have an outdoor 978MHz antenna now, at least: Amazon.com
I just hope they keep selling it, unlike the apparently limited-run dual-band antenna from a while back.

12

Yes indeed.
@wiedehopf deserves this appreciation. :+1: