MFj-1796 Vertical Dipole Arrrival

The new MFJ-1796 vertical arrived today. 

The first stand out was the length of the box - it's at least 2m long. despite the longest individual parts being 5ft. Not sure why you'd use a box quite so long. 

Upon opening, the first - somewhat annoying discovery was screws and nuts falling out. I later discovered, cautiously pulling bits out at a time (painful on such a long, end opening box), that the "bits" bag, despite it being a heavy duty plastic isn't quite strong enough for the pieces of metal that it contained. Hmm. 

Excuse the mess on the carpet - I haven't vacummed in a couple of days and I tend to trudge between the garage and the study a lot, so it tends to be a high traffic area with a lot of gunk from the garage floor coming in.. 

Overall, it was a lot of box for not a lot of content. It seems to be broken down reasonably well, and I think everything is accounted for based upon a quick count.  

Still, it's all pretty heavy duty compared to anything else I have. There's a bit of weight in it so I'm glad I've gone with such a heavy duty pole - one that I definitely can't mount with the existing mount. 

I'll give it a crack over lunch and make a start on it. The manual suggests its a 2 hour odd build, then it's probably a weekend job to actually tune it. 

I do wish though that these American folks would deal in metric. Whilst I am old enough to have still been taught the basics of inches - it's mostly just a case of 1 in = 2.5cm, 12 in = 1 foot = 30cm (ish) and so on. 7/16" and 5/16" however are fractions that make my head hurt.  Nothing a quick Google can't sort out, but still... metric is a lot easier ;)