I have never had any kind of "permenant" installation at my QTH. Since I had a house, my office has been subterranian, leading me to either have a setup that is mobile or something that can be carried out to the deck and quickly set up and torn down. This has led me down some more intresting aspects of the hobby including being into satellites where I could set up a handheld Yagi antenna, work something overhead for about 15 minutes, and then trot back into the house and go back on with life. However, I yearned for something of a more permenant nature. When my wife and I decided to redo our basement in 2020, part of the request was three runs of coax to my office. This was dutifully installed by the electrician. I had the radio, I just needed a antenna. Simple, right? Some wire, a BALUN, raise... I can do that. I don't need to waste money on buying it!
And there the coax sat. Gathering dust.
Over a year later I finally admitted my lack of time to sit down and, ya know, build an antenna was my constraint. So I just went on eBay and bought on of the countless cheap dipoles that are built by some random person who has more time than I. Cop out? Yes. Was I going to lose another winter of being without an antenna otherwise? Also yes. Once the antenna arrived I went out in what felt was the last warm day in December 2021 and "temporarily" lashed a piece of PVC to my deck and used a throw weight to string up some ropes into the trees. My wife ignored the yellow wire visible across her kitchen window and I was in business.
Now, in April of this year, the cheap antenna showed why it was so cheap and started to be squirelly on its SWR. As April wore on into May, it was decided the deck needed to be painted, so my mast needed to come off. Plus, I still had two unused pieces of coax that were just sitting there. So I took this as an opprotunity to design something a bit more permenant. My wife has always cringed when I pointed out the free standing towers that I see on other Hams' houses so I proposed, and she trepedatiously accepted, a small-ish mast on the back side of the deck. With the approval I started looking for options online.
I have always been a big fan of PVC. Beyond the intended use of piping, I find them to be a combonation of tinker toys and legos for adults. I have built a number of Yagis with them and I felt comfortable working with it. The project I kept coming back to was N3HNA's design which met most of the criteria I was looking for. I didn't like his "I used stuff I had hanging around" because that's not a particularly good pattern to follow, but I felt that the design was more or less solid. I set out to work.
A solid foundation
The first step I took was to make something I could attach my mast to. I didn't want to use the exisitng deck, so I decided to instead, just install a 8 foot fence post into a conrete base. The New England rocky soly didn't let me go down the three feet I wanted to, so I settled on two and a half.
Next, I set the post in with gravel and approximately 200lbs of concrete, plumbed it, and secured it with two 2x4s for support it while the cement cured.
A week later, I began to assemble the first half of the mast, putting a 2" PVC pipe directly attached to the post. I spray painted the PVC green in an attempt to make it look a bit more presentable and for some UV proteciton and then used PVC cement to attach a cap in order to not have water leak into the pipe itself. While I didn't think it would affect anything, why take chances? I also removed the 2x4s and filled used some gravel to neated up the hole a bit.
Once done, I took the pipe and attached it to the post with two quarter in lag screws and attached my Ed Fong DBJ-1. VHF/UHF side complete!
Next, the hard part. For my the HF side I wanted to put it up 20 feet and that required two PVC pipes attached to each other. N3HNA's instructions are a bit vague on this, so I want to call this out PVC cement is not enough to keep the pole upright and attached. N3HNA's instruction makes it seem that his metal pieces were a good idea, and I just want to go on record that some kind additional supports are requirements. I went with lag screws again that I attached at 120 degree offsets at the point where the reducer touches the top and bottom of the PVC pipes
To make it easy to access the dipole, I added a pulley and a carabinerto the top of the 2" PVC right below the cap. This would allow me to raise and lower the dipole without needing to take down the mast. As I noticed the PVC bent over time when I had it lashed to my deck, I added a coupe of eye hooks to the post and the top of the PVC mast to connected with paracord to try to counteract the weight of the dipole. Finally, with the help of my son, atached the mast to the post with three quarter inch lag screws.
Success! A week later, some grounding, and we were in business! Now to see how it does in regular use!