2 Meter Circular Dipole

I picked up a 2 meter circular folded dipole from vhfloop.com during their memorial day sale for $50, instead of the usual $130. The antenna came promptly from Canada. Assembly was quick and fairly easy.

I wanted the antenna as I needed something small to mount in my closet. I'm living in an apartment and unable to mount anything outside.

Tuning the antenna was interesting. The antenna is very sensitive to conductive objects around it. (in the instructions it mentions to not mount near anything conductive.) In the closet I am mounting it in, it is on a metal wire shelf. I had it balanced on it while trying to tune it so I could reach the screws to tune. I noticed if the antenna was not perfectly level, my tuning was very far off. I ended up mounting the antenna with duct tape, but there are 4 mounting holes for a better and more secure mount. Overall I was happy with the tuning I was able to get, but I imagine it could be improved if I mounted it away from conductive material. The results are shown below.

Results were taken with a NanoVNA. The antenna has a minimum SWR of 1.36 at 146.600MHz. 1.752 at 144.000MHz and 1.518 at 148.000MHz. Overall I am very happy with this antenna and would recommend it, especially on sale.

Mounting Update November 2021

My duct tape mounting did not last very long. My new solution is a piece of slotted steel angle bar mounted on the two diagonal mounting holes on the antenna. This is much stronger and definitely overkill for this. I also ended up picking up a new coax cable from Ham Radio Outlet. It's a 12ft RG8X cable with PL259 connectors. The antenna's coax port is picky with what connectors plug in nicely and my old one had issues fitting. This new one has no issues. Tuning went decently, I was able to get a minimum of 1.33 at 148MHz and 2.17 at 144MHz. This is not ideal, but I was not able to tune it to any better. I'm not sure why the tuning got slightly worse, it could be the new mount or the new coax or the sub-optimal mounting position, but any antenna is better than no antenna!