Mark: At my station I have essentially this scheme. I have one run of coax out to the tower. At the tower base I have an antenna switch that I remotely control from within the shack. The five HF ante
Gary: I have two suggestions: 1. Use PVC conduit but intersperse handholes/pullboxes along the route. In that way you can gain access to the conduit mid-span and pull through from one box to the next
Alan: I have one word for you to pass along to your neighbor, if you don't mind: Darwin. 73 de Gene Smar AD3F Talking to a fellow club member (and close neighbor) during Field Day, I heard about a to
Paul et al: Here's one equation for round conductors: http://emc.ice.uec.ac.jp/~xiao/Wire/index.html , and scroll down the page a bit. Would that be adequate? 73 de Gene Smar AD3F Does anybody know t
Richards et al: Once again I call your attention to the coax cable chart that Frank W3LPL composed back in the '90s. A copy can be found at: http://www.k1ttt.net/technote/coaxloss.html . 73 de Gene S
Richards: The source data on cables for Frank's listing is the same info you referenced in your first post, except Frank's has been <translated> into Ham bands for us. I'm not sure what else you migh
Keith: FWIW: I constructed a portable crossed inverted-V antenna for RACES and MARS work and for Scout demos, etc. The dipole wires on mine are cut for different bands and connected to one piece of c
Chas: Polyphaser make a surge arrestor just for DC cables such as rotator control lines. You bolt this arrestor onto a grounded metallic plate such as your bulkhead (?) and connect all 7 or 8 control
John: If the two cage dipoles can be fed from the same coax line, then there is no need for a T connector and parallel lengths of 75 Ohm cable. Simply connect both wire sets to the same center insula
Dick: To paraphrase R.E.M., What's the frequency, Dick? The MFJ-259's are notoriously prone to misoperation in the presence of BCB transmitters. If this is a Topband antenna and you have a local AM B
Ken: My neighbor at the end of my block installed one of these things a couple of years ago. While the tech was on-site cutting a slit in the neighbor's driveway for the wire, I asked him what freque
TT: The incident below reminds me of what I will call AD3F's tower maxims: 1. There are no such things as <accidents>; 2. When raising any antenna higher than your head, first look for powerlines or
TT: In addition to electrocutions associated with towers and antennas, there have been news articles recently about how dangerous the commercial tower industry is becoming. It has been labeled one of
Jim: FWIW - A LPDA is at best a two element radiator. The gain will likely be less than that of a three element Yagi. The LPDA provides a wider bandwidth than the Yagi, hence its popularity with mili
Jerry: As did quite a few others on this list, I would also advise you to put at least two pullboxes in your conduit run. Life is too short for you to try to pull all that cable in one run. You also
Jeff: I agree with Tom - don't use the chimney to mount any appreciable-sized antenna. The chimney may look sturdy but mostly they are three sides of brick that are attached to the house with galvani
Greg: For ten years before I installed my tower in the back yard, I had a bunch of wire antennas strung through the trees. The coax to these antennas exited my shack through the crawl space underneat
Paul: I'm sure others on TT would tell you the same thing: put all the elements and antennas up at the same time. You'll have only one period of shock to the neighbors' sense of the aesthetic, then i
Jeff: In a self-supporting tower, all the overturning moment is applied at the concrete base. For my short (64-foot) tower and its modest HF Yagi load I constructed a base of 10.5 cuyd of 3500 PSI co
Tim: Use a long screw eye into the trunk. Long because you want to leave part of it sticking out of the trunk to allow for expansion of the tree trunk. Otherwise you'll have to unscrew the eye a bit