Choosing Antenna to use

[fleart1]

I have very little knowledge of antennas and a limited budget. I want to buy an antenna and I thought an omni antenna may be best since it is so general. I want the antenna to be capable of receiving very low frequencies of 30Hz to 2.4 or even 5Ghz if possible. Can anybody give me an idea of the category of antenna or information on which direction to search. Thanks in advance.

 

[Harald Kapp]

I don't know any antenna that operates satisfactorily from 30 Hz to 52.4 GHz or 5 GHz.
Antennas are designed to operate within specific, rather narow frequency ranges.
Tell us more about your application and why you need such an extreme range.

 

[fleart1]

Well I want to get the low frequencies and also see how much more I could get in addition: most for the money in other words.
.

 

[bertus]

Hello,

There will be no antanna that can cover the full range you are giving.
An antenna for 30 Hz will be huge as the wavelenght is 10 Megameter.
100 kHz is 3 kilometer
100 MHz is 3 meter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength

Bertus

 

[davenn]

Well I want to get the low frequencies and also see how much more I could get in addition: most for the money in other words.
.

As Bertus said, no antenna will cover that frequency range ...

other than just a bit if wire and it will be very inefficient on any given frequency other than the one that matches the length
of wire that you choose ... It wont have any gain there, but will probably have something around 0dB rather than something negative


Is this for some sort of scanner ?
You will need several antennas to cover that range and switching between them
In the old days when scanners were popular, the discone omni-directional zero gain was the choice
for between ~ 100-400MHz range.
very low freq's you spoke of 30 Hz and up to say 100kHz will require very long wire antennas to have any real effectiveness

What are you wanting to listen to in the 30 Hz to 100kHz range ??

 

[bertus]

Hello,

For the higher frequencies, the educypedia has a couple of pages with the different antenna types:
Antennas
Antenna list
Antenna types
Dipole antennas
Helical antennas
J Pole antennas
Loop antennas
Parabolic Dish Antenna
Radar technology
Yagi antennas
Biquad antenna
Cantenna
WIFI antenna applications
WIFI - WLAN antennas
WLAN Antenna Tools
WLAN-Biquad Antenna
WLAN Netgear PCMCIA card
WLAN-Parabola

Bertus

 

[fleart1]

OK , I will have to do some more research then; thank you all for your input !

 

[bertus]

Hello,

The Internet Archive has a lot of Ham and Amateur Radio books:
https://archive.org/details/folkscanomy_hamradio

Have a look at the handbooks that you can find over there.
You will likely learn a lot from them.

Bertus