All that remained after Helene and the Snow/Ice storm of my 20' x 1.5" antenna mast. The reducer bushing held 10' of 1" galvanized pipe supporting a 27' 10M vertical and halyard for off center fed multiband dipole and multiband sloper. Helene broke the wiring of one end of the dipole and the sloper. Ice storm broke the 1" pipe supporting the wire antennas halyards and 10M vertical at the reducer. The white bit to the right is the Marine VHF antenna. Only one that survived.

30' of 2" galvanized pipe with 6' of 3/4" supporting 27' 10M 5/8 wave vertical and the wire antenna halyards. 63' total.


Re-using the 10' 1" galvanized pipe that broke off the 1.5" mast with 18.5' Comet GP-9 Dual-Band VHF/UHF Base Vertical Antennas for my dual band 2M/70cm transceiver. Going up beside the main mast opposite the Marine VHF. If you look closely to the left of the main mast you can see the base of the mount for this antenna. ~1 wavelength seperation.


Close up of the reducer, upper mast, halyards for the wire antennas @ 30' and ground radials of the 10M vertical. Stainless steel pullys for the halyards and UV resistant line. Allows me to drop the antennas to repair or replace. Want to see just what the Alpha Delta Parallel Dipole Antennas DX-CC does compared to the
Buckmaster OCF Dipole Antennas DX-OCF-HP. If not as good or better I will repair the OCF antenna and rehang it. When the Gods shine on me and the solar fires flare I can get into N. Africa and Europe on 10M phone with 100W from the Icom 7410 transceiver. Also a nice shot of my dad's 1965 Mercury Montclair my son shows at the car club gatherings.

I checked the SWR on the 10M vertical as it has a tuning section and it is dead on 1.0 SWR across the 10M phone band.
Bucket truck was supposed to be here yesterday but his truck broke down. No show again today and maybe if the Gods allow he will be here tomorrow but I'm not taking any bets.

 

What use do you give to the Marine VHF?

 

I put it up there so the wife could call when we are out fishing. Cell service is barely available at the house and nonexistent once we get to the outer bar and even in closer at times. However, the VHF will not reach the boat when we are ~30 miles out from the house as usual offshore. I also use it to get the marine forecast and listen to boat traffic as well at home. We are lucky here in that NOAA has a weather buoy where we fish offshore so I also check it online and get the data in real time (plus logged hourly for 24hr history trend) as well as the forecasts both on VHF and from the NOAA site online before leaving the house. 2-3' seas are about all I can handle offshore with my 20' boat. 3-4' or worse is a nogo and less than 2' is a beautiful day that doesn't happen very often. I have an Icom IC-M330 VHF on the bench with my ham rigs as well as in my boat.

 

Some wag said that being at sea in a small boat was like being in jail cell with a chance of drowning.

 

My boat is filled with foam and "unsinkable". Here on the Georgia coast, we are at the furthest west point of the east coast. The outer bar is 7 miles off the beach and ~12' deep and quickly drops to ~30' depth. The "drop off" for the continental shelf is 100 miles out and at where it starts dropping only 100' deep. Even where I go to troll for King Mackerel at 25 miles out is only 40-50' deep so here we have to go a long way out to fish. I have gone in 3-4' seas but with the wind and spray it's a very wet and bumpy excursion and I'm getting too old to take such a beating. On a blue-ribbon day with glassy seas, I've been ~50 miles out to some abandoned Navy radar towers but that is a very long trip. Which is why almost every boat going past the bar has a marine VHF and GPS.

 

Threaded pipe fittings are not adequately strong enough for water pipe mast application. Not even the ones for hydraulic pressure applications. I HAVE successfully used telescoping pipe sections with a u-bolt to prevent the smaller diameter section from sliding into the larger diameter section.Six inches overlap is adequate for two inch pipe,

 

The pipe is braced near the peak of the roof so there is only ~16' of unbraced vertical pipe. The guy who worked on the mast after hurricane Matthew? somehow put an internal reducer into the cast 1.5" x 1" reducer. I haven't gotten it down yet but it has to be a 3/4' reducer that somehow, he managed to get only a thread or two of the 10' 1" sub mast into. He was unable to remove the old reducer so he put another insert into it? I looked at the 1" threads on the sub mast and can see where only one or two were bent from coming out of the reducer. I am using the 10' 1" sub mast for my vertical Comet VHF/UHF dual band antenna to get it up a bit higher above where it is mounted onto the braced fascia near the roof peak. The guy came by today and removed the shed that was destroyed by Helene and will be here Monday with his bucket truck. Then I can examine the 1.5" pipes reducer and the insert reducer bushing he put into it. Can't complain too much as the guy who did it didn't charge me for a couple of days of bucket truck work even after I told him his charge would be paid by the insurance company.

 

Without climbing up and measuring I am not able to tell the diameter of the middle segment of a 50 foot pipe mast that I have, but the different pipe sections telescope nicely. Wit a foot of overlap there is no danger of any coupling failure.
To keep them extended I have used U-Bolt clamps of the correct sizes, which came from my local hardware store. A caution about U-Bolt clamps is that some are specified by inside dimensions while others are specified by the U-bolt center to center distance.
Two clamps for each pipe joint have provided adequate redundant security. But even the galvanized clamps need additional rust protection.

 

Galvanized simply slows oxidation and rust still bleeds from the threaded joints. This time I did use Never Seize on the threaded joints. One big problem I've had is getting correct sized u-bolts. Most in the hardware store are lightweights. Which is one reason for the reducer and sub mast is that most antennas and brackets will NOT mount to the 2" pipe. I did find some exhaust pipe clamps but their bolt length is too short. @MisterBill2 Is your telescoping mast free standing? Guyed? In my younger days, I'd use a set of tree trimmer gaffs and climb one of the local straight and tall long leaf pines (used for making line poles) and top it out. Had a rotator and 1/4 wave 3 element CB antenna that I retuned to 10 meters in the top of one pine tree. Made my contact with ZL4GO in New Zealand with that. I was in the CW band but for him it was his phone band so it was a pretty crazy contact. Actually, I contacted him a couple of times several months apart. Another thing I'm running into is the mix of SAE and Metric fasteners depending on whether made in china or USA. The reducer I found was made in china from 304 stainless and after mounting I found out why it was so cheap. It is not bored square so the sub mast has a couple of degrees of lean due to misalignment.

Also, are you familiar with the slenderness ratio? I designed a lot of process area lighting for explosion proof rated environments which meant schedule 40 conduit and fittings. Using the slenderness ratio, mass of the light fixture on top, and length of unsupported pipe you could determine the "wobbliness" of the support. I had a max target of 125 for the ratio for nice stable windproof mountings. I did a lot of structural steel and foundation analysis as well for hurricane force winds giving a nice overdesigned support for 100MPH wind force. Our Project Engineering manager was of the opinion that an Engineer could do anything. So in addition to computer automation instrumentation, I also had to work with piping, structural, power, foundations, and it all had to withstand coastal hurricane force winds and since the plant was right on the coast it was wide open flat ground with poor soil bearing conditions and a high water table. The good part though was that down here there is no frost line so didn't have to deal with ice loading and freezing soil conditions. Can't put my hands on my Structural Steel Handbook but it has the data in it for pipe and structural element slenderness moment.

 

Sam, lucky you only need a bucket truck. I needed a bit more elaborate to put up my HF beam...

 

Thats what I wish I had! I've told people for years that your best money spent is on antennas. A super fancy rig is useless if it can't transmit. Down here on the coast most towers are under 40' and not that heavily top loaded due to wind liability.

 

Galvanized simply slows oxidation and rust still bleeds from the threaded joints. This time I did use Never Seize on the threaded joints. One big problem I've had is getting correct sized u-bolts. Most in the hardware store are lightweights. Which is one reason for the reducer and sub mast is that most antennas and brackets will NOT mount to the 2" pipe. I did find some exhaust pipe clamps but their bolt length is too short. @MisterBill2 Is your telescoping mast free standing? Guyed? In my younger days, I'd use a set of tree trimmer gaffs and climb one of the local straight and tall long leaf pines (used for making line poles) and top it out. Had a rotator and 1/4 wave 3 element CB antenna that I retuned to 10 meters in the top of one pine tree. Made my contact with ZL4GO in New Zealand with that. I was in the CW band but for him it was his phone band so it was a pretty crazy contact. Actually, I contacted him a couple of times several months apart. Another thing I'm running into is the mix of SAE and Metric fasteners depending on whether made in china or USA. The reducer I found was made in china from 304 stainless and after mounting I found out why it was so cheap. It is not bored square so the sub mast has a couple of degrees of lean due to misalignment.

Also, are you familiar with the slenderness ratio? I designed a lot of process area lighting for explosion proof rated environments which meant schedule 40 conduit and fittings. Using the slenderness ratio, mass of the light fixture on top, and length of unsupported pipe you could determine the "wobbliness" of the support. I had a max target of 125 for the ratio for nice stable windproof mountings. I did a lot of structural steel and foundation analysis as well for hurricane force winds giving a nice overdesigned support for 100MPH wind force. Our Project Engineering manager was of the opinion that an Engineer could do anything. So in addition to computer automation instrumentation, I also had to work with piping, structural, power, foundations, and it all had to withstand coastal hurricane force winds and since the plant was right on the coast it was wide open flat ground with poor soil bearing conditions and a high water table. The good part though was that down here there is no frost line so didn't have to deal with ice loading and freezing soil conditions. Can't put my hands on my Structural Steel Handbook but it has the data in it for pipe and structural element slenderness moment.

My pipe mast was indeed free-standing, no guy wires or ropes. BUT it was sort of sheltered by a house on one side and a TALL pine tree on the opposite side. The base was a six foot section of larger pipe that the two inch pipe nicely slid into. In the ground the bottom of the pipe, four feet down, was surrounded by chunks of broken concrete. A few inches below the ground level it passes thru the center opening of a steel automotive rim buried just below the surface. The steel pipe was spray coated with nasty smelling anti-rust tar-like goo before the hole was filled in.
Certainly finding the correct U-bolts can be an issue. They did get a coat of "Rustoleum" sprayed on after the final installation.
The antenna on top was a RINGO, so the wind load was not large. The feed line was zip-tied every few feet with a twice around wrap, since I had a bunch of 12 inch ties.

 

I'm using the "end" of the house's roof fascia (which has been beefed up) to brace the mast. Which is at ~17' and the fence line around the house is old growth trees which acts as a wind break. On the coastal side of the house, I have over an acre of mostly tall fully mature Tulip Poplars going down to the marsh. Nice and tall which give additional hurricane winds relief coming in from the east. I did add another 10' section this time but also a 4' shorter sub mast. so only 6' taller overall. This time I will additionally ground the mast to a driven ground rod instead of simply grounding by resting on the soil. That should give a bit of additional grounding for the vertical antenna's ground plane elements. Many years ago, I bought a very tall telescoping mast for TV antennas to use as the center point for an inverted Vee dipole antenna but it was terrible and actually bent and collapsed. Paid more for it than a 21' stick of 2" galvanized piped. Which is waaaay better! I see telescoping masts available from the various Ham stores but they are still more expensive than galvanized pipe. I do find the telescoping carbon fiber masts interesting though if you want a portable mast for Field Day and such but also very pricey. At my age, investing heavily in a 40' Rohn tower is not something I'm ready to tackle and maintain although I've always wanted one but never could afford it with putting 3 kids through college and my wife working on her doctorate. Having to rent bucket trucks aint cheap either though!

 

Two of my three telescoping pipes are indeed galvanized, and the third is heavily painted.
As for Rohn towers, I have no issue with used towers that are in undamaged condition. I paid $200 for the used 58 foot 25G sections, with no bolts but with a tilt-over base. That was evidently a great deal. Then I got several more sections free for removing towers from a SK's widow's house. So there was a fair amount of work involved, but an entirely adequate compensation.

Used towers do become available, and often at a very reasonable price. Of course, I have also refused to deal on used towers asking almost new prices, or more. AND I have seen a "Rude Dude" asking huge prices to remove and take away installed towers.

 

Bucket truck arrived! Mast is up with 5/8 wave 10M vertical on top. Halyard on mast with Alpha Delta DXCC parallel dipole hung. Small sloper hung and 2M/70cm Vertical up on roof mount. All aerial tree anchor lines in place as well for long all band sloper and long wire antennas. Now I have to finish coaxes to window pass thru and coax and switches for all my radios to use the antennas. Only real problem faced was with the 2M/70cm vertical mount. Had to be straightened up a bit to get it off of the DXCCs wire and parallel to the main mast instead of a bad lean into it. Also, some new lightning arrestors to wire to ground and grounding the main mast and the second window pass thru panel I installed as the original is filled. Pictures later, I'm whipped and needing coffee and a bit of rest!

 

Looking at the old mast, its sub mast snapped off! there id 1/2-3/4" of threaded pipe left in the reducer. Apparently, there was enough hurricane wind and ice load on the 27' 10M vertical and whatever was also on the OCD dipole that got pulled apart to do the damage.

I am a whipped puppy but have all the antennas back up except the long wire and all band Sloper still to hang. The tree anchors and one halyard waiting on me to recover a bit to finish hanging them. But, so far, everything is looking good although still some SWR testing and antenna tuning to really finalize the job.

Here is the end of the house with antennas mounted. Marine VHF and dual band 2M/70cm vertical mounted to the reinforce fascia. Braced at the apex of the roof for the 2" mast and unseen at the bottom is a piece of 3/4" galvanized pipe that is driven into the ground with ~2' protruding into the 2" mast over it acting as a base pin. Yes, it's spring time here with temps in the 70s and the Azaleas in full bloom!


Halyard with 40M-6M multiwire dipole and lower band traps.
View attachment 1742405242225.jpeg
Running out of pass throughs so added 2nd MFJ pass thru panel while they are still available. MFJ/Ameritron is retiring/going out of business. Still some lighning grounding for the arrestors at the panel and grounding the 2" mast.


Jerome and his bucket truck hanging the main mast. Couldn't have done it without him. Local fella who we use for tree removal, hurricane damaged shed removal and just about anything else you need. Guy can and will do just about anything you need for yard work.


Looks much better with some antennas hung! Now, to clean up the mess I made in the yard and in my Office/Ham Shack/Electronics Bench. Going to take a bit of a breather and finish the rest without hurrying too much!

 

Nice antenna farm.

 

Looking good from seeing the pictures!!. I am too cheap for a bucket truck so I use a gin pole that I was able to borrow. And I climb up the 58 feet using a safety belt and short safety cord. So if i ever fall it will be at most three feet.

 

Had to redo the mount for the Comet 2M/70cm antenna. Heavy winds had it sitting on the dipole. So reused the old 1.5" pipe mast and braced it to the fascia. Seems to be doing well with just one antenna on it and less of a wind load than the monster 27' 5/8 wave 10M vertical and the dipole. Also moved it a bit further away from the main mast to get a full wavelength of separation. The Alpha Delta DX CC and Sloper antennas were NOT ready to hang antennas. They have parallel wires that require work placing the separators to keep the wires parallel. 3 wires on the DX CC and 2 wires on the Sloper. For the DX CC it said to use bits of wire and for the sloper to use silicone sealant to hold them in place. A real PITA and not a simple job made even more difficult by the antenna wire being 12 AWG solid copper. Well, neither method worked very well. Doing some online research, I found a better method of using Zip ties. So I still have to lower them both to redo the separators. I hope they live up to their reputation or will put the Buckmaster OCF dipole back up. Redoing some wiring and coax on the radio end of the bench so haven't fired up the HF XCVR or RCVR yet but with the local (17 miles away) 2M repeater having an Echo Link connection it has worldwide activity. I called into a net being run from Australia with folks all over the globe. Now if I can get Echo Link working on my iPhone...

 

Almost done. Finished organizing all the coax inside and out from all the antennas to all the radios and accessories. Icom IC-R75 wide band RCVR, Icom IC-2730 4m & 70cm XCVR, Icom IC-7410 6m -80m HF XCVR. Yes, I like Icom! Plus, all the Watt Meters, Tuners, MFJ XCRV Preselector, coax switches, etc. But when I finally went to XMIT on the HF rig there was no output. Yes, I did check all the switches as well as all the Digital bells and whistles. No Bueno... So, it is out of warranty by a few years, discontinued, and considered obsolete by Icom so no dealer repairs. Ham Radio Outlet of Atlanta where I bought it from was kind enough to give me the name of a shop in North Georgia so it was packed and sent for a little vacation as it will take 6-8 weeks to get to it. Yes, this guy does a LOT of radio work and will even work on obsolete instruments and antique radios as well. Got all of the outside coax sealing finished and only 2 tasks left, tuning the Alpha Delta wire antennas and put up the long wire antenna. But I haven't done the wire antenna yet as I am mulling over just what to put up and am leaning toward a non-resonant End Fed antenna or Random Wire. So, I have also been doing quite a bit of antenna research work. Check out Peter Waters (owner of Water & Stratton in Great Britain) You Tube videos for a wealth of antenna knowledge. I'm slowly but surely getting it done all by myself since the bucket truck work was finished. Along with all the other work on my bench and between all the damn doctor visits!

I want to show you a couple of products I recommend.

Coax-Seal is a strip of mastic that is pliable like stiff putty. Wrap it around coax (or anything similar) and mold it in shape with your fingers and it seals water tight. It stays soft so to physically protect it use this too. The other material I got from Amazon. No brand label but it is 1" wide self-sealing silicone tape. I can be stretched but wrapped over whatever you want to seal it "vulcanizes without heat" to itself. It's non-sticky (at least to your fingers) and a good bit thicker than the regular electrician's tape and softer so it really gets into the rough or open spots it is applied to. Both really good stuff to use.