Bob: Don't use poly rope. The UV in sunlight causes rapid destruction of it. Nylon is OK and Dacron is the best. Nylon tends to stretch a bit while Dacron stretches much less. 73, Dan, N5AR If its an
Our club will be using a Gap Titan for our GOTA station on Field day. We are thinking about putting down 8 radials 60 ft long under it. The first thought was that this would improve the performance,
Paul, if you don't have too many cables, you can use a cap and drill the cable holes in a line side by side. Then, saw the cap thru the center line of the holes into 2 halves. Slip the 2 halves aroun
Additional loss occurs in the tuner which may be greater than xmsn line loss. QST has had measured losses for various commercial tuners as the subject of 1 or more articles. The losses on low bands a
Tom, I have the book. Sevick seems to use 250 permeability cores for the baluns. I assume he needs to match 50 ohm coax to a balanced 22 ohm load. There are numerous designs in the book to do that jo
Doug, I have built 2 phased arrays using lengthened Hytowers. The radials are soldered to a ring of nr. 10 wire around the base. The feed line is LDF5-50 hardline. A short piece of bare nr 10 is sold
Rag, you can see pictures of commercially available rotating tower hardware here. http://www.custommetalworks.com/rts/rts_products/rts_products.htm I understand these components were designed by K5IU
Our ham club at Oklahoma State University inherited a Mims "Signal Squirter" My recollection is that it used copper plated steel elements made by PreMax. They had ridges along the length for strength
I have a book "Yagi-Uda Antenna" by Uda. The forward was written by Hidetsugu Yagi. Here is a quote from the forward by Yagi. "The so-called Yagi-Uda antenna, consisting of wave-reflectors and wave-d
John, it is not necessary for the tower to be resonant to make an efficient radiator. Probably 99% of all ham tower verticals are not. You can get a 50 ohm match with an omega match at the base. You
I have a 131 ft crankup tower with a KLM 20m Big Stick antenna about 5 ft above the tower top on a mast extending 15 ft. The 2 outer elements are grounded to the boom and all others are insulated usi
I would try filling the tubing with sand and manually straightening it. You did not say how bad the bend is. If the element is kinked it is not possible to straighten it. 73, Dan, N5AR Hello, I've ju
"Since a vertical always has this basic lack of symmetry, there is no way to connect a feedline directly to the antenna without setting up common-mode currents that will make the feedline radiate. A
Hi Kirk: My understanding is that a sloper working against a tower is a sort of dipole with the tower as one part and the wire as the other. I have found that the sloper usually must be greatly diffe
Crank up towers using manual winches do not like to lower when strong winds are blowing. The weight of the sections is not great enough to overcome the binding forces between sections. Most if not al
Roger, I have heard of problems with N connectors on the end of long cables. There is reportedly a different thermal expansion between shield and center conductor which tends to pull the center pin o
Hi Phil: One of the projects I worked on before retirement required a very effective coax feedline choke. I solved the problem by stripping the lossy vinyl off a short section of the feedline, windin
Bill: I have found that the center pin solder job works best if the wire OD is a tight fit to the ID of the pin. I use a small piece of buss wire inserted into the pin to fill any air space. My best
I used aluminum wire radials on a Hy Tower in Dallas TX. After a year or so I pulled on the radial wires at the tower base and a short piece of wire came out of the ground. They were severely corrode
I separated the sections of a stuck 3" boom by pulling on the two ends as follows: There was a thru hole for a bolt on each end. I connected a short chain to a bolt thru the holes in each end. One ch