Week 4: Building the Simple Dipole Antenna

Hello! This week’s blog will be about how to actually build a dipole antenna.

Well, there are actually two types of general antennae: a transmitting antenna and a receiving antenna. If you are making a transmitting antenna, you must build something capable of transducing an oscillating electrical signal (alternating current or AC) into an electromagnetic wave. A dipole antenna utilizes two radiating elements with each of the elements being one-quarter of the wavelength of the electromagnetic wave that antenna would create. Logically, one can assume that the total length of the dipole would be one-half times the wavelength of the antenna’s transduced EM wave.

You can imagine the structure of this antenna as a T-Shape, where the left side of the top, horizontal line on the T is one of the elements and the right side is the other element. Elements can be any conducting metal, such as aluminum or copper, but both elements should be made of the same material because the vibration of that material in response to the AC signal is how EM waves are transduced.

It is important to note that there must be a small space in between the two radiating elements so that the signal source can be connected to both halves of the dipole separately. When an AC signal is supplied to this set-up, an electric field and orthogonal magnetic field is produced, and this is the EM wave transduced by the antenna which goes through space and gets intercepted by the receiving antenna. Luckily the same structure of antenna can also receive electromagnetic waves, turning them into an electrical signal which can be used for any type of communication.

See you soon!