WA5VJB Cheap J-Beam Yagi

Building your own yagi isn't all that hard. This antenna can be made with heavy copper wire, a piece of wood, and plastic tie-wraps. The disadvantage of this antenna vs aluminum antennas or commercial offerings are band-coverage (without modification) and weather worthiness. But if you are doing an indoor antenna, this yagi has the advantage that you can cut it for the frequency you want. Commercial UHF ham yagis are available for 430 to 435mhz, and for 440 to 450. Nothing serves the 420 to 430 range and we can get radios to run there. So building one's own antenna is possibly the way to go.

cheap yagi antennas for 2m, 220, 440.

See also WA5VJB CheapYagi PDF for another article on the same antenna.

Based on WA5VJB's design, N3LTV and I worked out a spreadsheet (Excel 2009 or later) to modify the numbers so we could pick a 420-450 center frequency for the antenna. Download the spreadsheet from here.

Photos of N3LTV's antennas
Two different antennas are represented, both built with the same instructions. The only caveat is that the unit with the thinner copper wire (insulated) didn't tune up properly until the driven element was replaced with the recommended 10-gauge copper. It appears that the parasitic reflector and director elements can be thinner wire, but the driven element needs to use the 10gauge wire.
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