20170330 10m Vertical

picture above, left to right – 2m/70cm on chimney – 10m vertical attached to fence post jubilee clipped to a cast iron cesspit vent pipe – ash stick supporting one end of my 20m dipole wire…

So, this 10m vertical antenna has been a very long time coming…

Back in June 2016 Colin, MU0FAL gave me this vertical for a fix or throw project – The antenna was old, the aluminium heavily corroded in the lovely Guernsey salt air and unfortunately in a typical Guernsey storm it came crashing down when various parts of it failed…

        

Initially I thought it was a Sigma Euro Comm antenna however it turns out it wasn’t, that being said they were VERY helpful and would send me the pieces to fix it – given that cash was in short supply (still is) I took the challenge to fix it…

The fibreglass was superglued to the aluminium.. some light hammering sheared the superglue and it all came apart fairly easily – inside the tube is plastic coated wire which has ring fixings on both ends and they were pop riveted to each aluminium end… I drilled them all out and took everything apart.

I called in some welding / lathe favours from a friend to fix the aluminum pieces… what I didn’t know was he had passed on to a friend of his and it unfortunately took weeks and weeks to get the relevant aluminium pieces BACK, ready to re-attach to the antenna – however – no money was exchanged – favours returned – happy days, WLV is a happy bunny!! 🙂

   

It all went back together really well too, instead of rivets, nuts and bolts were used and locking nuts, the fibreglass and aluminium parts were re-super glued back together… all ready to go…

Now life takes over – work, family and stuff… busy busy boy – weekends just blur and pass far too quickly so today I have taken a few hours off so I can get it up… shh, dont tell the wife, she wont notice eh – a stonking great 20′ vertical attached to the back of the house.. hummmm….

A huge amount of thanks goes to Keith, GU6EFB as I have had his antenna analyser for ages and this has made doing this and the 17m dipole I put up the other month (its rubbish BTW, I need to re do that) REALLY easy (antenna analyser added to wish list!)

So anyway, forgetting the ever increasing wish list lets get back to the ‘story’…. Colin, MU0FAL replaced this antenna with one exactly the same, so he swapped whips (the antenna is in 4 sections (the forth is an adjustable stainless whip) which avoided him having to sort the whip length again… I however had the full size whip that would have come with his new antenna, a brand spanking new and sparkly one (I asked him to estimate how long his was cut down to, he guesstimated 2’6″ (after i had finished mine was 2’4″ brilliant guess Colin, I’m impressed!)) 🙂

First off, with no cutting it had a SWR of 1.2:1 at 26.0 MHz – 6 drastically big cuts later (5″ moved the frequency up by about 600 KHz) – now at 28.6 MHz its 1.2:1 – again I’m a very happy bunny 🙂 – I did all this at ground level with a long length of RG58 and then put up in situ with an approximate 60’ run of RG213 hoping the SWR would still be OK, it was 🙂

thanks again to Colin for the donation of the fix or throw project – its been interesting and I wonder how long it will survive…

I’M ALL READY FOR THE 10M E SEASON – BRING IT ON! 🙂

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