A Slinky Antenna

By: Greg Mossop,  G0DUB

I built a Slinky antenna using four of the children’s toys.  The aim is to have a helically loaded dipole which you tune to resonance by shorting out turns at the end of the coils. Depending upon the quality of the Slinkys you buy this isn't really an outdoor antenna since corrosion can set in quite quickly.

A little out of focus but here are the raw materials. The two slinky's per leg have been joined together using the metal insert from a chocolate block connector. Once they were restrained in this way I filled up the connector with solder. The same approach was used for the wire terminations at the ends of the springs. The reel at top centre of the picture contains 40lb breaking strain fishing line used as a support for the antenna.

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A useful idea but probably more likely to be an indoor standby antenna for me. I was wondering about abandoning the co-ax feed and jumper wires and feeding it with balanced line as a doublet. It would certainly be easier than tweaking crocodile clips each time I changed band. 

73! G0DUB

Greg Mossop,  G0DUB

I used a normal co-ax dipole centre. You can see that to make life easier I put wire extensions on the springs which give a little more flexibility to the joint. There are a number of variations on how to feed a slinky. Some use one long continuous spring and have inductive coupling from the feeder instead.

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