I already had a tri-band vertical antenna covering 50MHz but with the sporadic-E season approaching I thought I'd try something horizontal and directional, so put together a Moxon. Working out what I needed for the mounting came down to a piece of aluminium angle extrusion, some wire clamps (as used on stainless steel rigging wires etc) and initially some (what appeared to be) plastic garden canes. These turned out to have steel cores so were replaced with fibreglass tent poles for the final version. Add some bell wire and we're done !
Here's the bracket, which is half of a commercial aluminium block / stainless U-bolt type, the tent poles needed 2 sections, and another short piece adding to the end to get enough length. The splice was done by running a 5mm tap down the hole and using an off-cut of stainless bolt to join the pieces together (with a little glue for good luck !)
The end result is shown on the main title image. It's connected with some RG58 to below the rotator then patch onto a vacant run of RG6 satellite cable which was the only spare at the time, not ideal but still seems to serve the purpose :-)
Within a week of it being on the mast there was an opening, and I worked ZS4TX/6 in South Africa on TEP/Es (not sure exactly the mode, or a bit of each !)
Here's the bracket, which is half of a commercial aluminium block / stainless U-bolt type, the tent poles needed 2 sections, and another short piece adding to the end to get enough length. The splice was done by running a 5mm tap down the hole and using an off-cut of stainless bolt to join the pieces together (with a little glue for good luck !)
The end result is shown on the main title image. It's connected with some RG58 to below the rotator then patch onto a vacant run of RG6 satellite cable which was the only spare at the time, not ideal but still seems to serve the purpose :-)
Within a week of it being on the mast there was an opening, and I worked ZS4TX/6 in South Africa on TEP/Es (not sure exactly the mode, or a bit of each !)