[aprssig] Antenna recommendation

[Joel Maslak]

On Jan 22, 2007, at 12:45 PM, VE7GDH wrote:

> I don't have their quarter wave, but I do have their very rugged  
> dual-band
> j-pole on a digi here right now. I'm quite impressed by how tough  
> it looks,
> but "here" is a non-alpine environment. However, we had lots of  
> (major)
> wind storms over the last month or two and it has survived.


I just built a plumber's special J-Pole out of the sturdiest copper  
pipe I could find, soldered everything together, and mounted it on  
the side of the house.  I then grounded it (benefit of the J-Pole is  
the whole thing can be DC-grounded), tying it to a ground rod  
directly under the antenna which is in turn connected to the rest of  
my house's grounding system.  I could swing off of the antenna if I  
wanted to, it would easily support my weight.  I sealed it up pretty  
good so that it's water tight at the top and where I mounted a PL-259  
jack, but left a drain hole in the bottom just in case I didn't seal  
things as well as I thought (I don't have to worry about insects  
nesting inside where I live so having an opening is no big deal).

But my home station is in a valley and I can't put up a huge tower,  
and all I cared about was reliable coverage within the valley.  It  
does that nicely.  It's also relatively lightning safe, can survive  
90MPH + wind that it's been exposed to, and should be extremely easy  
to fix if anything goes wrong.

That all said, I suspect there are 200 answers to the problem, but I  
would recommend "simple" over gain if the weather is harsh or if you  
would have a hard time accessing the site some of the time (or if  
like me want to install it and forget about it - I haven't done  
anything other than occasionally plugging in an antenna analyzer,  
verifying the coax connection still looks like it's watertight, and  
banging it around a bit to see if anything is loose - so far it's  
been very solid and I've done no repairs in the last 6 years).