MFJ-1796 Part 3

The saga continues.

I decided I'd take it outside and finish assembly and get it up on the temporary mount. The breeze seemed to make that difficult. 

Once it was upright, it became fairly clear that not even the temporary mount was going to support it with the wind. Not thinking, I anchored it to what was an old entertaining area that the wind long since destroyed. 

The antenna stayed up right... but I did forget that none of the screws holding the spokes in were particularly tight.  By the time I brought it down I was out about a dozen screws and nuts. Despite my son's best efforts with a rather large magnet.. we only salvaged a pair of nuts. 

I'll sort out some more screws and nuts... and some washers I think. I need more hose clamps and weed killer anyway, so what's another trip to the Big Green Shed?

What I did discover though is just how much wind drag this antenna gets - even close to the ground. It's pretty full on... that said, if I'd have looked up, I'd have seen my existing vertical at a 45 degree angle at the time, so it was certainly windy. 

It looks like it should cope OK, but I'd had some doubts about my existing setup's ability to cope with me shoving this on the end of a 3.9m x 65mm pole, clamping it on and just letting it go. This just reinforces that I'm going to need to give it a little more support. It was hard work at 4 feet from the ground. I suspect it'll be a lot worse when it's 20 feet from the ground. 

Revised plan is to get the new bits, put it back together with washers. Tighten them up. Put it back together outside when it's not so windy and work on tuning. Once that's done, hit them all with lock tight. 

If I can get it tuned, I'll drop the existing vertical and just mount it up there for now on the existing piping. I suspect that'll be hard enough work on my own - I think I'll drop the extension pipe down, mount to it at ground level with the capacitance cap off. Attempt to get it upright with the bottom of the pipe at ground level, get a couple of clamps around it to take some of the pressure, then when it's nearly tight, I'll start pushing it up. That should do the trick for a while.