At the Findlay, OH hamfest, back in September, I bought a used Gap Titan antenna. At the time, it looked like I got a pretty good deal on the thing. I payed only $100 for an antenna that cost about $340 new. Even so, I put off building it and setting it up as everything I read about it said that the instructions were difficult to follow, and since mine was half-built, I figured it would be even harder to build.
That turned out to be the case. All the pieces were there, but figuring out where to put them was a bear. And one of the hose clamps used to attach some spacers to the main mast was broken.
Finally, when I did get it all together, I had to decide where to mount it. Having had some success with ground-mounted verticals, I decided to stick the pipe I’d mounted it on into one of the flower beds and guy it down with three ropes. I figured that would do at least temporarily.
Unfortunately, when I connect my antenna analyzer to it, the readings were all over the place and nowhere near resonant on any of the bands. My guess is that it was just too close to the house and that I’m going to have to get it farther away, or ideally, up on the roof. The problem with putting it up on the roof is that my house has a fairly steep roof, and I’m pretty much chicken about climbing up there.
The real pain about all this is that to put the Titan up I had to take down my Slinky dipole, pretty much putting me off the air. After failing to get the Titan to work, I decided I might as well put the Slinky dipole back up on 30m, which is quickly becoming my favorite band.
Unfortunately, I’d unstrung the rope that supports the antenna, so that I could use that piece for one of the guy ropes. Replacing it wasn’t too difficult, but when I started to hoist the thing into the air, I discovered that I had somehow missed stringing it through one of the coil turns. When this happens, the coil gets all twisted up. This is bad because you can’t then easily adjust the number of turns in the antenna.
It’s not that hard usually to get the coil back into its original form, but somehow in trying to do so, I screwed it up even more. Pretty soon, I had at least two twists in the helical coil. It took me more than two hours to untwist the coil, and by the time I’d finished it was 5:30 pm and dark outside. So much for getting on the air that day.
That evening, I took another look at the antenna, only to find even more bad news. Some of the turns were beginning to rust. On top of that, one of the solder joints had come loose, probably because of all the handling.
So much for the Slinky. I put it into a box and put it on the shelf. I still think it will make a good portable/temporary antenna (with a little reconditioning and maybe a little mechanical redesign), but for now I think I’ll play with some other designs.
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