The general set up for 2m is the same as the HF bands. Antenna, cable, filter, SDRPlay1a receiver, computer, internet.

But there is a lot to say about the differences.

Antenna 

We use two antennas on the 2m band. One is used for horizontal polarization, the Big Wheel. And one for vertical polarization, a Diamond.  The horizontal antenna is connected to a separate receiver, which is set up for the lower 1MHz of the band. The vertical antenna is also connected to a separate receiver, which is set up for the upper 1MHz part of the band.

There are two reasons for this:

- The lower band is more used for horizontally polarized signals like DX QSO's, while the upper part is more used for vertically polarized signals, such as local QSO's, meetings and repeaters.

- a second reason for splitting up the band in two 1MHz parts is the fact that the receiver is not working very well using a sample rate of 2.880.000 samples per second. We come back on the technical reason for this.

Here we show the pictures of both antennas. The vertical is on top of the right mast in the left picture. The horizontal is the clover with three leafs.

The cable we use is H100. The length is about 20 meter.

Filter

Between the coax cable and the receiver we have placed a 5 pole high pass filter. All signals under 70MHz are attenuated about 50dB. The pass through attenuation is less then 1 dB. The filter is placed after the vertical antenna. We have to make a second one for the horizontal antenna,.....under construction. OK, Aug 8 2021 I made a band pass filter for the low band, see

here

To be installed yet.

Receivers

Both receivers are the SDRPlay1a. Both are set up the same for now. The difference in polarization can give us a reason to optimize the configuration. The config file looks like:

#######################################################
# 2m RSP1a nr 1
#######################################################
band low
device !rtlsdr 127.0.0.1:1234
samplerate 1536000
centerfreq 144500
gain -33

antenna Horizontal Big Wheel

#######################################################
# 2m RSP1a nr 2
#######################################################
band high
device !rtlsdr 127.0.0.1:1235
samplerate 1536000
centerfreq 145500
gain -33
antenna VerticalDiamant300

############################################################################

As you can see, the receivers are set up for a sample rate of 1536000 samples per second. So we cover the whole 1MHz with a little overlap between the lower and upper 1MHz.