One of my antenna projects was to make an antenna for 2 meters from coat hangers. It’s not a unique project; You can search the web for coat hanger antennas and find plenty. I just wanted to share it because I like how it looks. This is about the easiest antenna I’ve ever built.

I used five coat hangers, ring terminals, and a butt splice. The hardware used were 3mm screws and nuts.

I started with a 22 inch vertical piece and 22 inch radials then I trimmed them down to the finest SWR that I could be happy with. I was quite surprised.

After a little trimming I had about a 20.5″ vertical and 21″ radials. If you build this antenna, make sure that you start long so that you can trim it to the best SWR.

The radials were soldered to the ring terminals using a propane torch. I scraped the coating off the hangers so that the bare metal would be exposed. I’m sure that the solder doesn’t actually stick to the steel hanger, but it’s close enough.

The vertical was crimped to the SO-239 connector and then I poured solder into the connection so that it would fuse to the center pin. This was because solder would not directly fuse with the coat hanger. If I had used acid core solder that might have been easier to tin the tip of the hanger. Your mileage may vary.

The next step is the figure out how to raise this antenna. I’m thinking of using 1 inch PVC to run the cable through and then mount it to the top of 1 inch EMT using a coupling. I haven’t quite worked this out yet, but I plan on figuring that out later. For the time being I raised the antenna using my painter’s pole and a piece of PVC driven into the ground. Eddie and I tested it out at 5 watts, and he can hit almost any repeater within a 30 mile radius.

Let me know if you’ve built a Sputnik antenna (as I call them).

The ground plane antenna calculator can be found by clicking this sentence.