I am trying to make a yagi for a 900M. The tinkering starts causally with some 1.2mm welding wire (cut to size based on K7MEM yagi calculator, direct soldering, no special matching as suggested on K7MEM page) glued to a 1mm plastic strip, since I really didn't expect it to work. The result just works much better than a ceramic disk antenna (I need focused, direct, long distance beam in this case). I can read EPC card a lot further away.
But the strip is too flexible so I moved to chopstick + hot glue (for miniature), the halves of driving element is so hard to fix onto the boom. I have to cut broken lead and re-solder the RG178 cable once, re-glued many times.
To solve this issue, I have the following doubts:
Can I ditch the boom just stick them to my pcb casing (Its a plastinc box with 3mm thin walls, the lid is 60mm away from the PCB. I am thinking stick the elements through the sides of the lid. Putting the wire yagi on the casing lid didn't affect the performance much, thus I guess moving it 5mm inward won't make much difference) ?
Or can I use a PCB strip to solder the steel wire to a PCB bar
In both case, as to the gap between the 1/2 halves of the driving element , how big can it go ?
In case a boom is strongly suggested, does a metal boom and non-metal boom make much difference (I mean booms isolated from elements) since all boom options in the DL6WU calculator are metal, while K7MEM include non-metal. I wonder if this has any significance.
PS: ppl might wonder why care to ask since you already have a working yagi with 1mm thin "boom". As you can see, it's a causal test, I don't know what performance to expect, the small circular polarized ceramic disk antenna distant is too close, big ones has a mysterious radiation path at distance - tags have to be moved around to find a readable spot. So,I guess I might be comparing orange to apples, and the test is only successful to my new comer standard.