The Ground Plane Antenna: Evolution

	My 'sturdy groundplane' had served me well on many different planes, but like all good things, it was time for it to evolve.  This latest iteration of the groundplane simplifies the design even more.
Antenna considerations and options
First let me say that I have been flying a lot lately with a standard "whip" antenna on my high wing planes since the whip can easily clear the ground even when I have it pointed down, and it is a pre-made antenna that takes no work on my part (always a bonus).  I still itched to fly my video systems on my zagi-like planes, so I needed to revisit the groundplane antenna which is a good fit for this type of aircraft.   This is the latest iteration of my groundplane. Thanks, Bill

Construction Details

My new antenna departs from my last design in one significant way: The small bit of copper pcb board that made up the base of the antenna is completely gone.   Instead, the ground wires are soldered directly to the coax shield as shown in the following series of construction photos
The raw coax from previous designs was replaces with a premade coax cable with SMA connectors from www.Jameco.com, part number 163854.  I simply snipped off the sma connector on one end to begin the antenna prep. Other than that, the coax prep for the new antenna is identical to the last design..  The coax is stripping of 5cm of the outer sheath, and the the shield is trimmed down leaving about 5mm of braid exposed. The exposed shield is then tinned.
The next step is to prepare the ground wires.  In this photo you can see that I have simply taken two lengths of 14 guage wire and bend them back on themselves.  The overall length of these bent wires should be about 40mm to give us room to trim later.   You can see how I've overlapped the two wires to create a 'hole' into which we'll thread the coax.  We'll lightly pull the bent wires away from each other so that the tinned coax shield is trapped in the hole.  Hints: when bending the wire, try to get the radius of the bend to match the radius of the tinned coax from the previous step.
Here's the final antenna.  After trapping the tinned shield of the coax in the loop formed by the overlapping ground legs,   I soldered the legs to each other and to the coax shield.  Then the legs were bent outward to create a star, then downward to about 45 degrees.
This is the final antenna .  The ground legs are cut to exactly 3cm in length, measured from the bend.  The signal wire is also cut to 3cm, measured from where the signal wire exits the coax shield. A small dollup of goop at the base of the signal wire and also on the coax under the ground legs helps stabilize the antenna. There is no additional support for the signal wire since I wanted it to have a little bit of "give" during belly landings of my flying wing.
That completes the construction of the revised ground plane antenna!