Over the past year, I've been exposing my fishing-pole supported delta loop for 20m to increasingly harsh conditions.
Whilst putting the pole up and down is very easy, taking only a minute, it is a bit of a hassle, especially as in the UK, winds tend to blow up, die down, and blow up again over the course of a day. Constant retraction in the face of high winds is therefore not really ideal.
video-2012-11-02-13-16-48 from John Rowlands on Vimeo.
My pole has never slipped under load. Slippage happens when the pole is exposed to winds from another direction, because they've already been loosened, and so fall down. The trick is to stop the sections slipping, which most people do with tape. This is OK, but it does damage the protective lacquer on the pole, which does have a certain degree of weather protecting quality to it.
Now I use jubilee clips (hose clamps) with butterfly nuts at the bottom of each section. I got mine in the UK from FEP Hydraulics. This seems to work very well, in that my antenna has now lived through several strong gales (up to 55mph) from the west and east, with no slippage.
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