With Varying Frequency – Amateur Radio Ponderings

I started talking with Tom N9ZV about building a set of custom Heavy-Duty Tilt-Over Flagpole vertical antennas for me back in late 2015.

His masterpieces arrive that Winter, only to be sidelined while I worked through a very distracting health issue, then decided to move house, and then ran into the virus-games disruptions.

The Home QTH and Island QTH are identical builds, but not identical installations.

The new Home QTH is fed with a type of hardline and has 33 radials, where the Island is fed with true marine-grade LMR-400 variant with just 8 radials.

https://k9zw.wordpress.com/?s=ZeroFive will get you to my prior posts about both QTHs.

They were very late getting on the air – some point in 2020 for the Home QTH and 2021 for the Island QTH.

I’ve made contacts on eleven ham bands using the antennas – 160, 80, 60, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12, 10 and 6m and lave logged perhaps 25-30,000 QSOs using them!

We also regularly fly flags on both of them, but mostly at the Island. Typical flags would be a large USA Flag above a St George’s Flag – which is the true flag of England from where the XYL came from.

I am using a FlexRadio TunerGenius XL (so2r versions) with a FlexRadio PowerGenius XL and Flex-6700 at each location.

I had expected more performance differences between the radial count differential but have found them to operate basically the same. The Home QTH with more radials does tune up easier for 160m (which is outside of the promised specifications) but both work.

I had these over-built both to survive Wisconsin weather, the Island unfettered winds, and because I was of the mind to do it right but just once.

Well worth the effort and cost, as these are lifetime installations.

Only beef is the supplied USA flags, clips and halyard were normal commodity items, The halyards especially needed upgrading, and I bought better bigger flags and clips with silencers (cut out much of the clinking).

Check the antennas out at https://zerofive-antennas.com/ and tell Tom N9ZV I sent you!

Highly recommended!

73

Steve
K9ZW