We all read about 40, 60, or even 100 foot towers with rotors and beam antennas Someday I might even have one myself. But for now I have to be satisfied with the real estate I have. My property has some challenges and being a renter I'm limited to what I can do. My landlord has graciously allowed me to do pretty much what I want as long as I don't make any permanent changes to the property.
So what to do? Wishing won't get anything done. Waiting for the perfect property may take forever! So I decided to make the best of the situation. Here is my El Cheepo 30 foot "tower" on the left side of the picture.
I started with three ten foot sections of TV antenna mast from Radio Shack. I had gone to Radio Shack to buy some batteries and found the ten foot sections were on sale. I can't remember the price but they were almost give away's so I bought all that they had (ten sections). This mast is VERY light weight compared to the mast on the right hand side next to the house; but as I said there was a huge difference in price too.
Besides the antenna mast you will also need two six foot T-posts some
radiator hose clamps, a bag of concrete, guy wire, and something to tie
the guy wire to. I dug a 2 1/2 to 3 foot hole in the ground with post
hole diggers. I then reached down in the hole and wallowed out the
bottom of the hole so that it had a little bit of a bell shape. That is
to help hold the concrete in the ground once it's set. Cut four feet
off the TOP of one of the ten foot sections of mast. This is the end
with the taper on it. Next clamp the four foot section of mast between
the two t-posts as shown in the picture above. Make sure that when the
t-posts are lowered into the hole that the mast section is six or seven
inches above ground. Next mix up your concrete. Use a fence post
leveler to make sure your mast will not be leaning and set the t-posts
into the concrete. When the concrete has set; take the remaining two
sections of mast and connect them together. Then take the remaining 6
feet of the mast you cut and put it on top. Make sure and use a little grease or silicon at the joints or they may rust together and be difficult to separate later.Attach these sections to
your mast base and you have a fairly stable 30 foot mast! You can loosen the radiator hose clamps and drop the entire mast a couple of inches to take tension off of the guy wires you will install or the dipole at the top. This allows you to quickly drop the mast without loosening guy wires or untying dipole legs. This is important in areas where thunder storms pop up at a moments notice.
In my situation, there was not a lot of room for guying. If you look closely at the photo above you will see a guy wire behind the mast. It is attached to one of those portable stakes for dogs that you screw into the ground. The ground is soft here so I concreted that into the ground as well. The guys wire goes up somewhere around the twenty foot mark and is attached to the mast by a u-clamp that is clamped around the mast.
Having no room to stake out the other guy wires, I put two large eye screws into my window sill and tied of the guy wires to these. They go over my drive way but are high enough for my minivan to easily clear them. This is an old house and the window sill is hardwood. Make sure what ever you anchor your guy wires to will hold the load. Because I only have a multiband dipole on this mast, there is not a lot of strain on the mast even in very strong winds. It has held up with very little maintenance for several years. This mast is meant for a light load. In the end, you have to consider weight, wind load, and stability when erecting any structure for antennas. The heavier mast would probably not have worked in this situation but the lighter stuff worked perfectly with the t-posts and made a perfect mast for my multiband fan dipole. It's not a beam but I regularly work dx stations on twenty meters and have fairly good luck on 40, 15, and 10 also. I have less than $100 tied up in the mast and the antenna.
If you want to lower and raise a dipole you can add a pulley at the top and rope or cable to raise and lower an attached dipole. In the picture above you can see that I used plastic covered metal clothes line. I also used radiator hose clamps to attach a tie off to the mast. I had to tie two lengths of the cable together to get the 60 feet needed. If you look closely at the picture above where the cable is tied off you can see the two cables are tied together with a square knot and the ends all cinched down with tie wraps. not pretty but it worked great. Just a side note: One end of my dipole is tied off to a stake in the ground. The other side runs towards my garage and is tied off via more eye screws screwed into the trim and studs over my garage door. It took a little planning to figure out where and how I was going to tie everything off. With a little thought and creativity, you will be amazed what you can achieve.
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