Tag Archives: pole

How to fit T&K brackets to the corner of a wall

I love engineering challenges and I needed an elegant solution to mount a vertical antenna right on the corner of my house.
In the end, I used 3 x 24 inch T brackets from Barenco Antenna Hardware store. Poor Brian (Barenco owner) was a little confused by my request but he dispatched my order all the same and I’m pleased with the results.

By the way, a little tip. Don’t use those RawPlug type anchor bolts, they expand and they are tightened and could break off the side of the brick, particularly right on a corner. Instead, use Multi-Monti bolts. These cut a thread inside a pre-drilled hole. The beauty of Multi-Monti bolts is that you can remove them and re-install them at will. If you want to fill in the hole afterwards, use Frame Mastic from ScrewFix (or similar). You will never know your aerials were once there.

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Raising Steel Antenna Mast on T&K brackets with pulley

I’m gradually swapping out any aluminium antenna poles for steel. Clearly these are very heavy, particularly with an antenna on top.

The trick is to use V bolts (like U clamps but in a V shape) and not to use saddle clamps because the pole will not slide easily past the U bolt saddle clamp.

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What size pole to insert to a steel scaffold tube?

Most radio amateur operators look at a pole* and immediately wonder how they might use it in their hobby. It becomes a weird past time and can become somewhat of a burden when passing for instance, a section of tubing in a handy-man store. I have to stop and work out if they nest together – or will they go inside some other tube I might have.

However, I have solved one riddle which is what diameter pole can I slip inside a standard steel scaffold tube?

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How to make a stealth amateur radio wire antenna

Until recently, I had a) a 40m triangular loop in the back garden which I called a “micro-mega-loop” and b) a 60m loaded loop that allowed me to get on 80m. The two loops looked a bit horrendous not only because of the wire in the air, but because I used halyards to lift them in the air to the top of wooden stair rails. It was all very messy. They were also extremely close together along the back of the garden which meant some of my RF was absorbed by the other loop. See here: https://www.m0mcx.co.uk/sg-230-feeding-60m-skyloop-deltaloop/

I like loops for two reasons, a) for my small garden plot, I can achieve in half the size, what other do with a full size dipole and b) a resonant loop will also resonate on every harmonic, that means tuning a 40m loop at 7.1 Mhz means I also get 14.2, 12.3 and 28.4 Mhz.

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My pole connector

Aluminium Pole Clamp

You’ll see in a number of pictures, the use of a large slab of aluminium that I had to make up to allow the bottom section of my 12 meter mast to clamp to a pole. A pair of standard of 2 inch double clamps wouldn’t fit Moonraker’s fibreglass mast. The bottom diameter is 58mm (about 2 1/4 inches). I found this slab on eBay and won it for a tenner. It’s heavy though – don’t think it’s a light just because it’s aluminium. Of course, in steel it would be loads heavier.

It is such a handy piece of hardware that I sometimes wonder what I’d do without it, particularly as I was bright enough at the time to drill a few extra holes in case I needed them (which I do for the 40m dipole!)

I’ve also discovered that the top 8 meters of my fishing pole fits perfectly on the 12 meter mast with a piece of plumbers tube as an “insert”. The 12 meter mast fits on the 6 meter aluminium pole too. That’s a 5/8th for 40 meters or a full sized quarter-wave for 80m!