This may be a bit long and drawn out. Sorry for that but I will also be posting some photos of my project. I am new to the hobby. I am pretty excited about building my first station as I am sure many have been, are, and will be in the future. This is for those now and in the future who may run across the kind of problem I had with my used antenna. Some day some guy, like me, who is putting in his vertical will have a lot of questions. I am posting this in hopes of helping out with that project.
I have purchased used from a friend of mine who is still in the hobby. The purchase is for a Icom IC-701. It is an older unit but taking in to another friend in the hobby who does repair work on radios both ameture and CB determined that the 701 is in working order. The purchase included the IC-701 with power supply. A manual tuner from Barker & Williamson model VS300A. Also was a Hustler 5btv. Cost for all was $200. I was pleased he was so generous.
So I began the project of installing the 5btv. I was giving this project a week. It took much longer than that. I am greatful my wife was so patient with this. We are both retired and enjoy our hobbies. She did a couple of small lap quilts while I took nearly 3 weeks to get this antenna in.
First I laid a field of radials. 15 or so went in initially. Then I poured a pad for the antenna.
This hole is just under 2 feet deep. I ran into rock which soil in this local is famous for. So I widened my hole a bit for extra strength and formed this pad at the top. Prior to placing the cement I pounded in a 8 foot ground rod. It went in pretty easy. I did the dig and pounded in the rod right around the time we got a lot of rain here so the ground was pretty easy to work with.
I put a large yogurt cup around the ground rod. The rod is not going through the cement but next to the hole cement was placed into. It also goes down deeper than the cement hole. So I am certain I have a nice DC ground going on here. At this point I stopped and retired for the day.
Next morning I came out to do the cementing part. It had rained during the night and the hole had six inches of water in the bottom. No problem. You see when I do post holes in my day job I never pre mix the cement. I put in the pole or pipe or mast. I just pour in the dry mix and add water as I go. So water is poured in the bottom of the hole, cement mix, little more water, cement mix, and some water on top. I never do any form of mixing. I just let the water and mix do it's thing in the hole. When half of the mix is in I check for pipe plumb. Plumb it and continue with the mix and water process. After the last of it is in I check for plumb again.
I now walk away and let it set up. I did not use a quick set like I do on my satellite installs but did use a extra strength mixture for the pole. It wasn't that much more expensive than the regular mix and less expensive than the quick set. I had time for a longer set up so I used the extra strength mix. I had time to let it cure a few days. My brother teased me about my poor cement skills but hey I don't care. I know I am not great at it but I don't need perfection in looks here. I need the job to get done. He admitted his skills were as good (bad) as mine after his teasing.
Meanwhile I put in some more radials. I was up to 28 now. So I began to wonder about how to get my coax into place. Now was discovering I have make a bit of a goof here. I had coax laid on the ground to this point from the corner of my garage. It is right around 120 feet between my antenna and the station. The coax lays at the bottom of my fence line. Loops around a storage shed and connects to the antenna. Now I read where the coax needs to be buried UNDER the radials. Hmmm. So I got ahead of myself here. If it isn't under the radials it becomes part of the radial system. For some reason I won't even go into here because I don't know the reason it has to be buried. I am sure I read it I just didn't retain it as to why this is so.
Anyway I came up with a plan to bury the coax. I was not going to run it around the fence line like it was doing so at the time. I would get some PVC and bury the coax in some PVC. I had some RG8X that I don't think is direct burial. I also bought some cable that is made by Browning called BR400. Now I don't know if this is as good as Times Microwave or not but I bought it at a local place here in town that offers a few items to the local ameture crowd. The store is owned by a guy who is into ameture radio. The focus of the store is computer parts and repairs with some ham small parts stuff on the side. This coax was being offered for sale there. I bought the 100 foot run.
I began the dig for the pipe. Again the grass was damp from rains I planned out a route that goes between a couple of radials. The dig was fairly easy due to moist ground. Some rocks were encountered but as many of us know you just get a big digging bar and dig them out. I only went down just deep enough to bury the 2 inch dia. pipe.
This run of PVC had to go under some landscaping cement that had been poured as a flower bed barrier. So a hole was dug under the cement and inserted under it. You will see bend in the pipe in the above photo. I had bought a 22.5 degree connection piece for this but found the bend was closer to around 15 degrees. So I grabbed my heat gun and heated the pipe up quite a bit and bent the pipe over my knee. Poured some cool water on it to set the bend. Worked out fine. A little further out on the pipe run pictured above you will see a black utility pipe jumping over the pvc. I broke a water sprinkler line while digging. I started out digging knowing it was there but not exactly where. My shovel cut the sprinkler line so I had to make a repair on it after getting the PVC laid down. Now I am ready to pull some coax through.
So I grabbed my reel of fish tape and pushed it back through the PVC. I black taped the BR400 and RG-8x and pulled them both through. I staggered the points to connect the two to the fish tape. I also pulled some ethernet cable trough. I can use this later to pull more coax if needed. I have tons of ethernet I bought cheap at the local Restore so I just used what I had an abundance of instead of going and buying some string or such.
Time to bury the pipe. But first my mildly OCD mind said what else? I don't want to bury the pipe and think a year from now I shoulda coulda done something more. So with that I came up with a plan for two more runs of coax.
Another friend down the street had one day dropped off some really nice LMR600. The real Times Microwave stuff. There were two rolls of it. Both turned out to be 100 feet apiece. His has a job where he uses this stuff all the time. He says these short pieces are more trouble keeping around. They use this stuff off those giant spools on the back of big trucks. These short pieces are just annoying to them so they don't save them for next jobs much. He grabbed these two runs after a day of laying this stuff and brought them to me. I was into CB then but he thought I could use them. Why thank you neighbor!!!
I decided this was going into the trench next to the PVC pipe and then I would bury all. I was happy. My OCD brain approved. Before restoring the sod pieces I saw I had room for two more radial runs. Down they went. I now have 30 radials The sod was put back into place. Water was poured on the sod. I walked along the sod to smash it back down and walked away.
Now I began the tuning process. I down loaded the DXE instructions. I read peoples experiences of installing and began the process. TROUBLE abounded. I began a two week experience of trying to get the 5btv to tune right. 10m OK. 15m OK. 20m trouble. 40m even more trouble. SWR and each section were just getting more impossible to adjust. High SWR that just could not be tamed. Adjust traps. Adjust section lengths. By the time I got to 40 meter I just did not have the ability to do any adjusting. The section was extended as far as I dared but was still to short for good SWR. Over and over with each attempt to tune after talking to my buddy Google and his sharing others experiences I was wondering if I needed to nix the idea of a vertical and move to a dipole? So many others had trouble with used 5btv antenna adjustment.
My brother was accusing me of being way over the top about perfection. He said just use a tuner to work it out. My wife was sympathetic and asks what can be done differently? We decide maybe this is the wrong location for the antenna. You see it is going into a cluster of junipers grown on our back fence. Is the trees causing me the grief?
I don't want the HOA to come down on me. I am on the board but still trying to be a good neighbor here. There isn't anything in the covenants about antennas being on the naughty list but my wife did agree to my participation in the hobby if I did my level best to hide the antennas from a neighbor who has already grumbled about my CB antennas I had built and put up greeting her view first thing in the morning when she gets up and looks out the window. My wife admitted she didn't care for them either.
So now I wondered if this was a really bad plan. One last attempt at making this work. I woke up Sunday morning. Decided after church I would take the antenna apart and really look over the connection points and revisit the corrosion I saw inside the traps when I had opened them to do trap adjustments to tame SWR.
Here is what I find in the 15m trap.
The 10 and 20 meter traps were not as bad but still had rust on the rivets. I got out my cordless drill and put on a wire brush on the end and began whizzing off the rust. There was some rust still left between the aluminum and the joins to the rivets and I asked my buddy Google how to remove rust. One way is to apply concentrated lemon juice. So i dabbed on some concentrated lemon juice with a cotton swab.
I put the traps back together and assembled the antenna. I used the factory spacings suggested in the DXE instructions I had downloaded. Put the antenna back between the trees. The wife and I had agreed on a new location of the antenna in the yard not involving trees but I decided to have one more go at this once it had been cleaned lubed with anti seize and rust removed.
BAM! 10m was pretty much dead on. 15m was good too. 20 meters was showing good SWR low in the band but climbing to the end. I am going to concentrate on phone so this isn't good for my needs. CW and me have not been good friends in life. I approached this hobby knowing I may never code. Sorry folks but that is how my brain is working or not but I still plan on enjoying the hobby.
40m was below band and raising. Bad SWR in the band. Good below band. So I began focusing on fixing 20 and 40m. I didn't have the 80m section on yet. I am adjusting without it. Perhaps this isn't a good idea but that antenna is a bugger to remove and walk trough the trees and lay on saw horses to adjust. I am to close to a patio awning to consider a tilt down section. Besides that 40 meter spider has to be lifted up to get it over the top of the junipers. (May have trouble years from now if the junipers get taller)
Anyway I do a trap adjustment. After two adjustments the SWR is where I would like it to be. ;1.6:1 on band edges and 1.2 mid band. Moving forward now.
40m was a bit better now but SWR was still high in the high end of the band. I adjusted the length of the 40m section and it came into place. 2.2:1 in low band and 1.2:1 in the high end. Yes another adjust could be done. I had room but like I said I am focusing on phone so I called this good. I now placed the 80m coil and whip in place. Adjusted to what the instructions said would be high end of band. Narrow mind you but in the high end. Swr was around 2:1 around 3.875 and climbing rapidly above and below that. I leave it there. Planning on a dipole for that band anyway.
So my friend if you have acquired a used 4 5 or 6 btv I suggest you look over the trap coils. They may need some serious cleaning. The 15m trap can was pretty ugly inside too. I took a wire brush and cleaned the stain out of it and rinsed it out well with water and dried it with a cloth I pushed into it. I examined the other trap cans and they were nowhere near as bad but I still took the wire brush to them. The cleaning time took me a couple of hours to disassemble everything, clean it, then reassemble. It was so worth it.
I am one who is not afraid to do this kind of stuff. You may not want to approach this with a ten meter dipole. Yet for those who do and will I hope you have the same results of success I did. I took my readings at the feed point like the instructions say. I also went to my station and took another set of readings. I found that the band edges improved at the station. I am going to give credit here to the CM coils I put at the antenna and station end. I had read where many operators of this antenna reported that the coils did improve thier SWR. Mine seems to have done the same. Mid band SWR didn't seem to change much for me though.
So here is the view inside the trees. You can't see the 80m section due to bright light bloom making it invisible in this photo. I also at some point before doing the cleaning replaced the trap covers. That is when I saw the evidence of the corrosion. Later on that one Sunday morning I decided I was going to address that issue and see if it would fix my problem by removing the corrosion. This shot was taken prior to all this cleaning project. Still it is a good example of what the antenna looks like inside the trees. The 80m stinger can be seen above the junipers but hey I really don't care. I have done due diligence to hide it from everyone. My neighbor will have to really look hard to see it I think.
Meanwhile I am planning my 80m dipole that will also be along the fence line. 14ga. wire will hopefully be invisible not many feet away. But for now I have an antenna. Maybe some of us here will find each other on the airwaves one day. 73s. KJ7EFC
I have purchased used from a friend of mine who is still in the hobby. The purchase is for a Icom IC-701. It is an older unit but taking in to another friend in the hobby who does repair work on radios both ameture and CB determined that the 701 is in working order. The purchase included the IC-701 with power supply. A manual tuner from Barker & Williamson model VS300A. Also was a Hustler 5btv. Cost for all was $200. I was pleased he was so generous.
So I began the project of installing the 5btv. I was giving this project a week. It took much longer than that. I am greatful my wife was so patient with this. We are both retired and enjoy our hobbies. She did a couple of small lap quilts while I took nearly 3 weeks to get this antenna in.
First I laid a field of radials. 15 or so went in initially. Then I poured a pad for the antenna.
This hole is just under 2 feet deep. I ran into rock which soil in this local is famous for. So I widened my hole a bit for extra strength and formed this pad at the top. Prior to placing the cement I pounded in a 8 foot ground rod. It went in pretty easy. I did the dig and pounded in the rod right around the time we got a lot of rain here so the ground was pretty easy to work with.
I put a large yogurt cup around the ground rod. The rod is not going through the cement but next to the hole cement was placed into. It also goes down deeper than the cement hole. So I am certain I have a nice DC ground going on here. At this point I stopped and retired for the day.
Next morning I came out to do the cementing part. It had rained during the night and the hole had six inches of water in the bottom. No problem. You see when I do post holes in my day job I never pre mix the cement. I put in the pole or pipe or mast. I just pour in the dry mix and add water as I go. So water is poured in the bottom of the hole, cement mix, little more water, cement mix, and some water on top. I never do any form of mixing. I just let the water and mix do it's thing in the hole. When half of the mix is in I check for pipe plumb. Plumb it and continue with the mix and water process. After the last of it is in I check for plumb again.
I now walk away and let it set up. I did not use a quick set like I do on my satellite installs but did use a extra strength mixture for the pole. It wasn't that much more expensive than the regular mix and less expensive than the quick set. I had time for a longer set up so I used the extra strength mix. I had time to let it cure a few days. My brother teased me about my poor cement skills but hey I don't care. I know I am not great at it but I don't need perfection in looks here. I need the job to get done. He admitted his skills were as good (bad) as mine after his teasing.
Meanwhile I put in some more radials. I was up to 28 now. So I began to wonder about how to get my coax into place. Now was discovering I have make a bit of a goof here. I had coax laid on the ground to this point from the corner of my garage. It is right around 120 feet between my antenna and the station. The coax lays at the bottom of my fence line. Loops around a storage shed and connects to the antenna. Now I read where the coax needs to be buried UNDER the radials. Hmmm. So I got ahead of myself here. If it isn't under the radials it becomes part of the radial system. For some reason I won't even go into here because I don't know the reason it has to be buried. I am sure I read it I just didn't retain it as to why this is so.
Anyway I came up with a plan to bury the coax. I was not going to run it around the fence line like it was doing so at the time. I would get some PVC and bury the coax in some PVC. I had some RG8X that I don't think is direct burial. I also bought some cable that is made by Browning called BR400. Now I don't know if this is as good as Times Microwave or not but I bought it at a local place here in town that offers a few items to the local ameture crowd. The store is owned by a guy who is into ameture radio. The focus of the store is computer parts and repairs with some ham small parts stuff on the side. This coax was being offered for sale there. I bought the 100 foot run.
I began the dig for the pipe. Again the grass was damp from rains I planned out a route that goes between a couple of radials. The dig was fairly easy due to moist ground. Some rocks were encountered but as many of us know you just get a big digging bar and dig them out. I only went down just deep enough to bury the 2 inch dia. pipe.
This run of PVC had to go under some landscaping cement that had been poured as a flower bed barrier. So a hole was dug under the cement and inserted under it. You will see bend in the pipe in the above photo. I had bought a 22.5 degree connection piece for this but found the bend was closer to around 15 degrees. So I grabbed my heat gun and heated the pipe up quite a bit and bent the pipe over my knee. Poured some cool water on it to set the bend. Worked out fine. A little further out on the pipe run pictured above you will see a black utility pipe jumping over the pvc. I broke a water sprinkler line while digging. I started out digging knowing it was there but not exactly where. My shovel cut the sprinkler line so I had to make a repair on it after getting the PVC laid down. Now I am ready to pull some coax through.
So I grabbed my reel of fish tape and pushed it back through the PVC. I black taped the BR400 and RG-8x and pulled them both through. I staggered the points to connect the two to the fish tape. I also pulled some ethernet cable trough. I can use this later to pull more coax if needed. I have tons of ethernet I bought cheap at the local Restore so I just used what I had an abundance of instead of going and buying some string or such.
Time to bury the pipe. But first my mildly OCD mind said what else? I don't want to bury the pipe and think a year from now I shoulda coulda done something more. So with that I came up with a plan for two more runs of coax.
Another friend down the street had one day dropped off some really nice LMR600. The real Times Microwave stuff. There were two rolls of it. Both turned out to be 100 feet apiece. His has a job where he uses this stuff all the time. He says these short pieces are more trouble keeping around. They use this stuff off those giant spools on the back of big trucks. These short pieces are just annoying to them so they don't save them for next jobs much. He grabbed these two runs after a day of laying this stuff and brought them to me. I was into CB then but he thought I could use them. Why thank you neighbor!!!
I decided this was going into the trench next to the PVC pipe and then I would bury all. I was happy. My OCD brain approved. Before restoring the sod pieces I saw I had room for two more radial runs. Down they went. I now have 30 radials The sod was put back into place. Water was poured on the sod. I walked along the sod to smash it back down and walked away.
Now I began the tuning process. I down loaded the DXE instructions. I read peoples experiences of installing and began the process. TROUBLE abounded. I began a two week experience of trying to get the 5btv to tune right. 10m OK. 15m OK. 20m trouble. 40m even more trouble. SWR and each section were just getting more impossible to adjust. High SWR that just could not be tamed. Adjust traps. Adjust section lengths. By the time I got to 40 meter I just did not have the ability to do any adjusting. The section was extended as far as I dared but was still to short for good SWR. Over and over with each attempt to tune after talking to my buddy Google and his sharing others experiences I was wondering if I needed to nix the idea of a vertical and move to a dipole? So many others had trouble with used 5btv antenna adjustment.
My brother was accusing me of being way over the top about perfection. He said just use a tuner to work it out. My wife was sympathetic and asks what can be done differently? We decide maybe this is the wrong location for the antenna. You see it is going into a cluster of junipers grown on our back fence. Is the trees causing me the grief?
I don't want the HOA to come down on me. I am on the board but still trying to be a good neighbor here. There isn't anything in the covenants about antennas being on the naughty list but my wife did agree to my participation in the hobby if I did my level best to hide the antennas from a neighbor who has already grumbled about my CB antennas I had built and put up greeting her view first thing in the morning when she gets up and looks out the window. My wife admitted she didn't care for them either.
So now I wondered if this was a really bad plan. One last attempt at making this work. I woke up Sunday morning. Decided after church I would take the antenna apart and really look over the connection points and revisit the corrosion I saw inside the traps when I had opened them to do trap adjustments to tame SWR.
Here is what I find in the 15m trap.
The 10 and 20 meter traps were not as bad but still had rust on the rivets. I got out my cordless drill and put on a wire brush on the end and began whizzing off the rust. There was some rust still left between the aluminum and the joins to the rivets and I asked my buddy Google how to remove rust. One way is to apply concentrated lemon juice. So i dabbed on some concentrated lemon juice with a cotton swab.
I put the traps back together and assembled the antenna. I used the factory spacings suggested in the DXE instructions I had downloaded. Put the antenna back between the trees. The wife and I had agreed on a new location of the antenna in the yard not involving trees but I decided to have one more go at this once it had been cleaned lubed with anti seize and rust removed.
BAM! 10m was pretty much dead on. 15m was good too. 20 meters was showing good SWR low in the band but climbing to the end. I am going to concentrate on phone so this isn't good for my needs. CW and me have not been good friends in life. I approached this hobby knowing I may never code. Sorry folks but that is how my brain is working or not but I still plan on enjoying the hobby.
40m was below band and raising. Bad SWR in the band. Good below band. So I began focusing on fixing 20 and 40m. I didn't have the 80m section on yet. I am adjusting without it. Perhaps this isn't a good idea but that antenna is a bugger to remove and walk trough the trees and lay on saw horses to adjust. I am to close to a patio awning to consider a tilt down section. Besides that 40 meter spider has to be lifted up to get it over the top of the junipers. (May have trouble years from now if the junipers get taller)
Anyway I do a trap adjustment. After two adjustments the SWR is where I would like it to be. ;1.6:1 on band edges and 1.2 mid band. Moving forward now.
40m was a bit better now but SWR was still high in the high end of the band. I adjusted the length of the 40m section and it came into place. 2.2:1 in low band and 1.2:1 in the high end. Yes another adjust could be done. I had room but like I said I am focusing on phone so I called this good. I now placed the 80m coil and whip in place. Adjusted to what the instructions said would be high end of band. Narrow mind you but in the high end. Swr was around 2:1 around 3.875 and climbing rapidly above and below that. I leave it there. Planning on a dipole for that band anyway.
So my friend if you have acquired a used 4 5 or 6 btv I suggest you look over the trap coils. They may need some serious cleaning. The 15m trap can was pretty ugly inside too. I took a wire brush and cleaned the stain out of it and rinsed it out well with water and dried it with a cloth I pushed into it. I examined the other trap cans and they were nowhere near as bad but I still took the wire brush to them. The cleaning time took me a couple of hours to disassemble everything, clean it, then reassemble. It was so worth it.
I am one who is not afraid to do this kind of stuff. You may not want to approach this with a ten meter dipole. Yet for those who do and will I hope you have the same results of success I did. I took my readings at the feed point like the instructions say. I also went to my station and took another set of readings. I found that the band edges improved at the station. I am going to give credit here to the CM coils I put at the antenna and station end. I had read where many operators of this antenna reported that the coils did improve thier SWR. Mine seems to have done the same. Mid band SWR didn't seem to change much for me though.
So here is the view inside the trees. You can't see the 80m section due to bright light bloom making it invisible in this photo. I also at some point before doing the cleaning replaced the trap covers. That is when I saw the evidence of the corrosion. Later on that one Sunday morning I decided I was going to address that issue and see if it would fix my problem by removing the corrosion. This shot was taken prior to all this cleaning project. Still it is a good example of what the antenna looks like inside the trees. The 80m stinger can be seen above the junipers but hey I really don't care. I have done due diligence to hide it from everyone. My neighbor will have to really look hard to see it I think.
Meanwhile I am planning my 80m dipole that will also be along the fence line. 14ga. wire will hopefully be invisible not many feet away. But for now I have an antenna. Maybe some of us here will find each other on the airwaves one day. 73s. KJ7EFC
