I found 12 ft worth of aluminum tent pole in a dumpster. It's the exact diameter to fit inside a hole in my truck bed. On top is a tuna can, with my old mag mount stuck to the top
It actually does work, I picked up a couple db, lol
Suggestions welcome. Ground plane wires maybe
@kelvin0mql @bren even without the plane under it, if the tuna can is making electrical contact with the aluminum tent pole, you’ll still get a counter poise on the driven element. It won’t be perfectly ideal, but I’ll bet it’s still pretty darn good the way it is now.
I love the creativity hack do-with-what-you’ve-got methodology. :-)
I'm gonna build a real tower soon, a friend and I have been testing out simplex and we both are working on getting our antennas up higher
But yea, shoestring style 😎
@bren @kelvin0mql if it works, it’s good. That is literally all that matters. I love it.
And, I’m a little jealous. There are so many hills where I live that simplex is nearly useless. We have several repeaters with good coverage, but that’s different.
@bren @smitty
I've got a telescoping fiberglass pole that is cheaper than most antenna poles because it's designed (in much higher numbers) for holding a banner. You've seen them by stores or new construction - looks like a butter-knife profile... it's the spine for one of those.
Then I have an Ed Fong roll-up colinear dual-band antenna clipped to the top eyelet.
I can get that thing 30' up, bungeed to the side of my truck. Then I cross-band through it hiking with HT. LONG range.
@kelvin0mql @bren that’ll do swimmingly!
@kelvin0mql
Hey! I am going to use that exact setup!! Awesome haha I'm filing this away
I was going to buy part of it last night but I bought a nano vna instead haha. I have the 12m pole and guy line in my cart at vibroplex
@kelvin0mql
I was thinking it would be cool to run an Ed fong antenna inside of the pole, but I heard him say you have to trim it to account for a different velocity factor and I don't know enough to mess with that yet lol
@smitty
@kelvin0mql
Yea I've got that roll up one sitting in a different cart haha!
@smitty
@bren @kelvin0mql the other problem is the loss from exiting the material. Fiberglass isn’t so bad, but plastic like PVC, is pretty lossy.
@kelvin0mql
Yea I watched a couple of his talks yesterday on YouTube, he talks about it in lectures 😎 the velocity factor and the different materials
@smitty
@kelvin0mql
Funny you mention it, I work at a pizza shop haha I'm about to bust open a dozen of those #10 sauce cans
@bren I've done a fair bit of this myself from time to time.
Anything you can do to get more ground plane will help. Check with an Italian restaurant - they may have empties of those BIG cans of tomato paste/sauce.
Also, once you have a steel disc bigger than a tuna can, consider sheet-metal-screwing some lengths of steel tape-measure to it, for ground-plane elements.