So my brother recently bought a house and a piece of land in the next county over. The house is on a knoll in the head of a holler, and although he is in kind of an open/high spot relative to the rest of the holler, it's still a holler and has some hills on all but one side of him.
So he wanted to put up a base station antenna to use with his new Uniden Bearcat 980SSB in the house, so we made a trip to Lowes and I basically duplicated what I did for myself to get a good amount of height on my antenna for not a lot of money, and thought I would share the story and a picture for anybody who is interested either out of curiosity, boredom, or maybe you could use/modify what we did to serve your own purposes.
He wanted to set up a pole like the one I made for myself but a little taller so he picked up a 16 foot treated 4x4 beam, a 10 foot piece of galvanized 1" conduit, some hurricane braces and 1" U brackets. I put it all together for him. A-99 mounted to top of the conduit, conduit centered on one side of the 4x4 and bracketed down with 3 brackets and 3 inch outdoor screws, and a piece of wood screwed to the side of the 4x4 directly under the end of the conduit to stop it from sliding down through the brackets. I made sure that the conduit overlapped the 4x4 by two feet. I figured that would give it plenty of leverage to resist wind damage without taking too much off our total height. It was strong enough that when we first started erecting it I lifted the whole thing by the conduit.
I zip tied the coax and lightning ground wire to the conduit to stop wind from jerking them around and to keep weight off the PL-259. He bought 100 feet of RG8X coax for the run and I soldered a couple Amphenol connectors onto it for him. I peeled back enough of the shield so I could bite some of it in the threads of the reducer for improved stress handling (less strain on the center pin if something yanks down) and also shield ground continuity (plus I soldered into the holes to help with shield/ground continuity). I cleaned the inside of the A-99 connector since he had used it at his old house with some high concentration rubbing alcohol and then applied a liberal coating of dielectric grease to the PL-259 before connecting it to the antenna. I gave it a snug fit with a pair of channel locks, then wrapped the connector area and first few inches of the coax (making sure not to block the antenna drain hole) with coax seal to hopefully keep rain water out of there. I also cleaned inside the connecting areas of the antenna with rubbing alcohol and filled the female ends with dielectric grease before re-assembling the antenna with the locking washers. Something to keep in mind here is that fluids do not compress, and when we tried assembling the antenna we felt some pressure about halfway down and thought we had cross threaded it. I re-threaded it 3 or 4 times and got a little farther until I just applied a little extra force and some of the dielectric grease finally farted out around the threads and let us tighten her down. For future reference it may be a good idea to not fill the female ends completely full of dielectric grease, but just make sure they have a good liberal coating. I recommended RG8U for a run that long, but he had already bought the RG8X so we went ahead with it. The coax wraps around and enters one of the vents for his loft and I bored a hole in the roof above his radio desk to drop the coax down through. Excess coax is going to be rolled up and hung from a nail in the loft, and I zip tied it where it entered the house to a board so the wind can't cause it to yank on the connections and things inside the house, and left enough of a droop in the portion of coax outside the house for rain water that runs down it to drip off without following the line into the house and rotting/molding the wood. The only thing I'd like to do is swap in a proper 8 foot copper grounding rod; right now the grounding rod is a 4 foot steel coal mine roofing bolt which I found (I used one for a while) rusts and causes continuity problems.
The hairiest part was erecting the whole thing once we got it all assembled, because once you get to about 45 degrees the majority of the weight is all on your shoulders, and you really don't want to drop it or for that bottom end to kick out and ruin everything you just put together. I just had him put downward force on the lower end of the 4x4 to keep it from kicking up or sliding and I stood it up for him, then the two of us twisted it around and used hurricane braces to mount it both to the porch floor (on top of where a cross member runs) and to the eave of the house (screwed into a 2x4 inside the eave). The good thing about having the 4x4 on bottom is that it's so much heavier than the antenna and the conduit that once it's vertical, the wind can whip the antenna around like a wet noodle and exert almost no pressure at all on the house or hurricane braces. This is almost identical to the way I have mine set up except I used a 12 foot 4x4 instead a 16 footer. We're discussing replacing one of the hurricane braces with a heavy duty hinge so that if it ever needs work, he can take the hurricane braces loose and lower the whole thing by himself if I'm not available for whatever reason.
Once we got everything set up and the coax ran, we hooked up the radio and checked the SWR and it's a perfect 1.0. Made contact with some people in the next county over and they said it sounded good. I talked to him from my mobile (Cobra 148 GTL) for about 20 minutes on the way home before I started going in and out of these big mountains and I lost him (both of us barefoot radios so only 12 watts PEP). We talked on single side band and I have to say, his Bearcast 980 is one of the clearest sounding single side band radios I've ever heard. It was crisp and clear, didn't drift (at least that I could tell), wasn't high pitched, I mean it genuinely sounded good on single side band.
Here's a picture of it once it was all said and done.
So he wanted to put up a base station antenna to use with his new Uniden Bearcat 980SSB in the house, so we made a trip to Lowes and I basically duplicated what I did for myself to get a good amount of height on my antenna for not a lot of money, and thought I would share the story and a picture for anybody who is interested either out of curiosity, boredom, or maybe you could use/modify what we did to serve your own purposes.
He wanted to set up a pole like the one I made for myself but a little taller so he picked up a 16 foot treated 4x4 beam, a 10 foot piece of galvanized 1" conduit, some hurricane braces and 1" U brackets. I put it all together for him. A-99 mounted to top of the conduit, conduit centered on one side of the 4x4 and bracketed down with 3 brackets and 3 inch outdoor screws, and a piece of wood screwed to the side of the 4x4 directly under the end of the conduit to stop it from sliding down through the brackets. I made sure that the conduit overlapped the 4x4 by two feet. I figured that would give it plenty of leverage to resist wind damage without taking too much off our total height. It was strong enough that when we first started erecting it I lifted the whole thing by the conduit.
I zip tied the coax and lightning ground wire to the conduit to stop wind from jerking them around and to keep weight off the PL-259. He bought 100 feet of RG8X coax for the run and I soldered a couple Amphenol connectors onto it for him. I peeled back enough of the shield so I could bite some of it in the threads of the reducer for improved stress handling (less strain on the center pin if something yanks down) and also shield ground continuity (plus I soldered into the holes to help with shield/ground continuity). I cleaned the inside of the A-99 connector since he had used it at his old house with some high concentration rubbing alcohol and then applied a liberal coating of dielectric grease to the PL-259 before connecting it to the antenna. I gave it a snug fit with a pair of channel locks, then wrapped the connector area and first few inches of the coax (making sure not to block the antenna drain hole) with coax seal to hopefully keep rain water out of there. I also cleaned inside the connecting areas of the antenna with rubbing alcohol and filled the female ends with dielectric grease before re-assembling the antenna with the locking washers. Something to keep in mind here is that fluids do not compress, and when we tried assembling the antenna we felt some pressure about halfway down and thought we had cross threaded it. I re-threaded it 3 or 4 times and got a little farther until I just applied a little extra force and some of the dielectric grease finally farted out around the threads and let us tighten her down. For future reference it may be a good idea to not fill the female ends completely full of dielectric grease, but just make sure they have a good liberal coating. I recommended RG8U for a run that long, but he had already bought the RG8X so we went ahead with it. The coax wraps around and enters one of the vents for his loft and I bored a hole in the roof above his radio desk to drop the coax down through. Excess coax is going to be rolled up and hung from a nail in the loft, and I zip tied it where it entered the house to a board so the wind can't cause it to yank on the connections and things inside the house, and left enough of a droop in the portion of coax outside the house for rain water that runs down it to drip off without following the line into the house and rotting/molding the wood. The only thing I'd like to do is swap in a proper 8 foot copper grounding rod; right now the grounding rod is a 4 foot steel coal mine roofing bolt which I found (I used one for a while) rusts and causes continuity problems.
The hairiest part was erecting the whole thing once we got it all assembled, because once you get to about 45 degrees the majority of the weight is all on your shoulders, and you really don't want to drop it or for that bottom end to kick out and ruin everything you just put together. I just had him put downward force on the lower end of the 4x4 to keep it from kicking up or sliding and I stood it up for him, then the two of us twisted it around and used hurricane braces to mount it both to the porch floor (on top of where a cross member runs) and to the eave of the house (screwed into a 2x4 inside the eave). The good thing about having the 4x4 on bottom is that it's so much heavier than the antenna and the conduit that once it's vertical, the wind can whip the antenna around like a wet noodle and exert almost no pressure at all on the house or hurricane braces. This is almost identical to the way I have mine set up except I used a 12 foot 4x4 instead a 16 footer. We're discussing replacing one of the hurricane braces with a heavy duty hinge so that if it ever needs work, he can take the hurricane braces loose and lower the whole thing by himself if I'm not available for whatever reason.
Once we got everything set up and the coax ran, we hooked up the radio and checked the SWR and it's a perfect 1.0. Made contact with some people in the next county over and they said it sounded good. I talked to him from my mobile (Cobra 148 GTL) for about 20 minutes on the way home before I started going in and out of these big mountains and I lost him (both of us barefoot radios so only 12 watts PEP). We talked on single side band and I have to say, his Bearcast 980 is one of the clearest sounding single side band radios I've ever heard. It was crisp and clear, didn't drift (at least that I could tell), wasn't high pitched, I mean it genuinely sounded good on single side band.
Here's a picture of it once it was all said and done.
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