Antenna
When I bought an upgrade from my baofeng UV5R (ANYTONE AT-778UV), I figured a new antenna set-up was in store.
My base station antenna is a Diamond X50, attached to a custom mast.
This setup was a heck of a lot better than the rubber duck on my handheld, but because it was only about 8ft. from the ground, the environment and houses nearby would block both TX and RX signals significantly. I also found that over the nearly 70ft. of coax cable I use, only about 1-2W actually exits the antenna when the source signal is coming from my 5w handheld radio.
(Monday was my b-day 🥳)
By using some more hose clamps and some generic slotted angle bar, I was able to construct a sturdy and (not really) lightweight mast to hold up the antenna about 3x as high.
Me, struggling to hold up the entire mast.
With some effort, I was able to slowly hop-trip-skip-walk-slide myself and the giant antenna over to where I planned on mounting it. I did end up dropping it ’lightly’ on the ground at one point because the wind caught it just wrong. The entire thing landed on the carbon fiber antenna case, which seemed to do slight mechanical damage as it is a bit looser now. The good news is that it works the same electrically (I checked).
After I got it to the railing I planned to attach it to, I utilized more trusty hoseclamps to secure it in place. I ultimately ended up using 5 hose clamps. 3 up top, and 2 down low.
Because I was a bit paranoid that it could fall onto a car, I set up a guy wire.
One side is attached to the antenna, while the other is attached to the house.
If, for some odd reason, the hoseclamps holding the mast were to undo, it would fall onto the house rather than the cars. 😎
Once I finished securing everything I had to test it out!
I tuned into a traffic net…
It works! I made a simplex contact nearly 20 miles away on 2m!
This also unlocked a large portion of repeaters that I could not previously access. Upon requesting radio checks, people would confirm my audio was clear and my signal was full quieting! This, to me, is a major accomplishment.
I also experimented with some SSTV transmissions and receptions with it, which did pretty well:
Thanks for reading!
– 73 de KC1VTJ
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