Guy Wires
Hello from sticklizard. 😀 I have another newby question. 😕 I have built my antenna. The SStran plan. I have put a mast in the middle of my Music Hall roof. 5 ft. of 2inch and 10 ft 1 1/2 inch heavy conduit. ( 15 feet) The 2 in pipe is 10 foot long with 5 feet going through the roof and attached to the super structure of the building. It is very solid. I am in central Oklahoma and we have alot of wind. Do you think I need to use guy wires?. If I do use guy wires. should they be grounded to the mast? Or should I use insulators?. I had a test run last saturday with just a vcr, and everything worked O.K. My ladder was a little short so I couldn't finish tuning. But I Hope to get it tuned this Saturday. I would never have gotten this far if it hadn't been for you guys on this website. Thanks, Sticklizard 😉
It doesn't sound to me like you need guy wires with 15 ft of heavy 2" and 1 1/2" pipe if it is very solidly mounted to the roof, but guy wires are always a good thing.
If you use guy wires, I recommend you ground them to the mast pipe (which in turn should be well grounded). As we know from Rich's excellent posts in this forum, ground wires will radiate a big portion of your signal. The guy wires will help to add open wire out there on the ground side.
Thanks, Phil, In the past few days we have had some fairly strong winds and it don't seem to move. The 1/2 inch copper on the top sways a little but that is to be expected. I may add guy wires after everyting is finished,Like you say a few more ground radials may help. I have the mast grounded to 2 ,8ft ground rods with # 8 copper wire. I hope to have some time this weekend to finish. I will let ya'll know how it all works .Thanks again, 😀 Sticklizard
If you use guy wires, I recommend you ground them to the mast pipe (which in turn should be well grounded). As we know from Rich's excellent posts in this forum, ground wires will radiate a big portion of your signal. The guy wires will help to add open wire out there on the ground side.
Unfortunately, radiation from guy wires is not useful in producing or strengthening the groundwave signal. Unless the guys are non-conductors, they will extract some of the radiation from the driven radiator, and re-direct it toward angles above the horizon -- which reduces the groundwave signal otherwise possible.
The guyed towers of commercial AM broadcast stations insulate their guys at the point where they connect to the tower, and also break them up with insulators at ~1/10 wave intervals to minimize such problems.
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I will defer to Rich. Sorry for shooting from the hip without thinking it through completely. I negelcted to consider the angle aspect. A veriical ground run will indeed keep the radiation angle more toward the ideal horizontal angle.
I love open forums. They can expose the truth under ideal conditions. 😀