[NLRS] Surplus Panel Antennas for Microwaves

[Jon Platt]

 Hi Thomas.  I suppose like most answers, it depends.  
I am not overly familiar with panel antennas, so take this all with a grain of salt.  We are usually using horizontally polarized on these bands and I'm not sure what panel antennas are or if they are "flippable".  For portable work, most rovers are using loop antennas like those from Directive Systems https://directivesystems.com/  .  Loop antennas generally cover the bands from 902 to 3400.  Myself, when roving, I have had good luck using Directive System 6' boom loopers.  For my home station I also use loop antennas on these bands but with longer booms.   
For 5.7 I use a 27 dB wire mesh commercial dish .... you can find these all over the place online.  One advantage is that they come with a feed and they are lightweight and low wind resistance (important sometimes when roving !).
For 10GHz I've been using a re-purposed 24" dish with a home made horn feed.  
So overall, an advantage of a dish at this frequencies is that, in theory, you could use one dish and change out the feeds, or for some bands have a dual band feed.   Getting gain at 2.4 GHz does requires a bigger dish, something that could be challenging to handle when portable and dealing with weather; that's why loopers are pretty nice for that application.
Hope this was helpful.  Others may have some comment as well.
73, JonW0ZQ




    On Friday, August 22, 2025 at 10:36:33 PM CDT, Thomas Murphy <thomasmurphy.mssm at gmail.com> wrote:   

 As an aspiring microwaver who will be fully committed to the portable 
life for the foreseeable future, how are panel antennas for the 
mid-microwave bands? Between WiFi/ISM and CBRS allocations, I've seen 
eBay listings for 2.4/3.4/5.8 GHz panel antennas between 10 and 23-ish 
dBi. Is their simplicity worth it in comparison to acquiring and tuning 
a/multiple dish(es) for getting started?

- Thomas / WN1C

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