Brolly Dish II: the Portable One
Created 12 October 2001
Having had some success with the original Brolly Dish, I set to building a design which would be really portable.
The great and the good, and me. Bob Seydler K5GNA, Me G6LVB, Bob Bruninga WB4APR. (If you look closely, Bob S is trying out his trough reflector).
1.2m dish, 2.4GHz feed & downconverter, and 70cm portable crossed Yagi. The dish is in the 3" diameter cardboard tube.
I stumbled on some conductive fabric called FLECTRON. This is NOT cheap. Look for part #240-680 at http://rswww.com. I needed almost all of a 1m x 3m roll. But it does fold up quite nicely.
I used very similar construction techniques to the original Brolly Dish except that in order to attach the Flectron and maintain some tension I used a long armed paper stapler and many dozens of staples. Towards the middle of the dish the stapler wouldn't reach so instead I inserted and folded the staples manually and successfully perforated my fingers half a dozen times in the process. Ouch.
When squint's high, add a few more elements to the uplink
One point of note is that the material has a significantly higher wind load compared to fly screen, so use your back pack to hold down the tripod.