When I began activating, I would carefully guy my mast, sufficient to withstand a gale. The mast was fiberglass, not carbon fiber, to ensure an RF-pure support. Or I would use a slingshot to get a line over the highest possible tree branch.
Eventually, I decided to always use a mast, because sameness is goodness. And sameness helps me not to forget critical items (such as walking off the summit and leaving my antenna in the tree!) The mast is about 10 meters long, so it’s good for holding a half-wave for 20m. It’s carbon fiber, and definitely not RF-pure because the wire tunes at a much shorter length than in free space. It was much less effort than hauling a heavy, long, Jackite mast.
I began using bungee cord to hold the mast to a tree/fencepost/sign, because it was quicker than guying. I securely bound the mast to the support at multiple points, to prevent it pivoting around a single support point and falling to the ground. Securely fastened.
At one point the situation prevented a perfect setup, and I found myself saying, “What the heck… It only has to stand for an hour,” and I began to get much more slapdash about it. Nowadays, if the wind is mild, I often fix a wire to the mast while it is on the ground and raise it until it gets wedged in some branches. “Yep. That ought to last for about an hour.”
On my second summit yesterday, I used a ‘stuck-in-the-branches’ about 20-30 degrees off vertical. To the objective observer, it was pathetic. I prefer to think of it as a perfect fitting of limited resources (I was tired!) to the solution of a problem (getting a wire somewhat off the ground).
The radio waves don’t seem to mind.
73 DE K4KPK / Kevin
From experience I’ve come to value reliability/quick setup/easy carry over theoretical goodness. The experience being working pretty much the same folks with the same reports (± QSB) using a simple, light, quick antenna setup vs something theoretically much better.
The classic in this regard was KX0R’s post about being on a peak with winds so high that setting up normally was impossible, laying the antenna more or less on the ground, and to his surprise finding no lack of chasers.
Agree! Most of the time I operate in a sloper. I lean my mast against a tree, stick it in a bush, stick it in the snow, strap it to a post. Sometimes the sloper naturally draps over the branches of a tree near my operating position giving me a mostly inverted-L!
Pretty much any antenna configuration will work in a pinch…high or low off the ground…in extreme winds I’ve had to deploy the HOT half of my dipole inches off the ground laying it on small bushes…the other half (ground side of the dipole) laying totally on the ground…it still works good enough to make many contacts.
As the solar cycle improves so will the apparent performance of even a marginal antenna.
Having said that, 99% of the time I use a base support…a long shafted Screwdriver with the shaft pushed into the ground. My mast fits over it, and I tie the mast to a small bush/rock/branch a foot or two off the ground. Short ropes tie the dipole legs to most anything, at varying heights from 5 ft (tree) to barely off the ground (a rock or bush).
That puts the apex of my dipole at 14 ft or so off the ground. Goes up in a few minutes…works well. No guy ropes needed. The low elevation makes it easy for me to open/close the links on my link dipole.
