Came across this great product for antenna building for UAV's. Adhesive backed copper foil 5 mm wide. Great for creating your own dipoles, vee's or helix, easily soldered. Attach it to fiberglass or plexiglass or directly to the foam (prepped with acrylic spray to help adhesion or just taped over with package tape). Create dipoles or vee's directly on you wings (not over your carbon fiber spars though).
Keep experimenting!
This is available at Sparkfun. https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10561 $2.95 for 50 feet
Comments
@ Ryan
Without knowing your installation its difficult to say if the antenna would de-tune. If its mounted to the surface of a wing, exposed to weather, yes i think moisture would be an issue. I'm preparing to use this copper tape to put a 430 mhz and 900 mhz horizontally polarized Vee antennas on my CTH Deep Reaper. I plan to cover the antennas with clear package tape to keep them from damage and mositure. I'll post some photos when I get them installed.
Sorry I should have addressed that at @Travis.
Even for circuit boards, I believe I would rather have it insulated as much as possible and create my own connections.
But I believe for an Antenna, if it wasn't insulated/non-conductive adhesive, moisture could detune the antenna compared to one that wasn't exposed. Is this a correct assumption? I am only getting into antennas this semester.
@ Ryan
I dont suggest it for antennas. That was a comment by another that was intended to be cautionary if the copper tape was to be used for circuit boards. For antenna puposes it simply isnt necessary.
Can I ask why you suggest the conductive adhesive?
yes on wheel ant. all over my head,I will go to the x8 page on the rest so its all in 1 place
@ James Sowell
Long time no talk. It seems that I'll be using a lot of different bands with the X-8. 430 mhz for the radio control, 900 mhz for telemetry, 5.8 ghz for video and 144 mhz for a locator beacon if I crash it. The idea was to keep the antennas in the cockpit but it looks like I might need to add Vee antennas on the wings using the copper tape. Hope you saw the blog post about the Wheel Antenna that will be used for telemetry. You been flying? I still havent started the X-8 yet (got all the parts though) but have been building a CTH Deep Reaper so I could get in some aileron practice and to try out some of the antenna ideas.Would rather crash that than the X8
If only my wings were vertical :)
are you going to rig 1 up on the x8?
If you're making any circuits out of copper tape, do yourself a HUGE favor: make sure to get conductive adhesive copper tape (I can't tell if the SparkFun product has conductive adhesive or not). I spent 4 hours debugging a touch sensor once just to learn that this was the problem. Also... I frequently build antennas out of copper tape. It's great, since an x-acto knife can be used to tune the antenna. Just be sure to solder all connections to ensure good RF conductivity. RF is different from low-frequency operation -- something that has 0-ohms at DC can be an open circuit (or extremely lossy!) at 900 - 2000 MHz.