Saturday 23 May 2015

Stealthy Roof Mast

courtesy: https://openclipart.org/
Colorado DXer and YouTuber, John Bellini, has been at it again.

This time it's his stealthy mast to support some small VHF utility antennas. If you're interested in a simple stealthy mast for the roof-top, you may find some worthwhile hints here. His system would make a very nice stealthy support for a PAØRDT mini-whip which would put your antenna well above the house and its associated noise fields ... have a look.

4 comments:

Bert, PA1B said...

Hello Steve, thanks for sharing the video. It's a very nice idea and a very nice construction. Very nice video. 73, Bert

John, KD6VKW said...

Nice video. However, near the end, the mast is shown being pulled up from left to right and the cable attachment point to the mast is clearly above the top of the chimney as the antenna reaches its full height.

To me, that means the cable is not running in both pulleys, only the front pulley (the pulley nearer the front of the house). At the rear pulley, the cable appears as if it would then be running against the safety wire on the rear pulley.

Is this the case or have I missed something? It appears that I see a point of failure if the small wire is worn through by the cable.

73,
John, KD6VKW,
San Diego CA DM12

Unknown said...

Hi John,

Yeah I didn't notice that until I saw the final video in full screen either. I originally had the cable attachment point lower on the mast so it would not interfere but I decided it took too much force to pull it up. I got the mast to pull up easily when the pulling force was set higher up the mast. I did not take my last minute change into consideration.

Needs some tweaking admittedly.

I plan to remove the cable capture wire on the pulley closest to the antenna and and replace the middle roller with another pulley immediately adjacent to the antenna side pulley which hopefully will guide the cable to seat as the antenna is lowered. Maybe add a guide flange to either side of the antenna-side pulley too.

John Bellini
Lakewood, Colorado

Unknown said...

I have fixed the issue and have put up an engineering update video to the original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak0IwO7zQEI

John
Lakewood, Colorado