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| Hand built clevis, tilt-over mast for £175? Excellent! (this is slightly modified from the standard mount) |
If you're an antenna experimenter, or perhaps operate largely seasonal bands like 6m, then a mast that's easy to put and bring down is a really useful piece of kit. Sadly, being ham radio, if you look at anything that will do this that's sold on the full commercial market, it will set you back several hundred pounds or more.
Enter a Scottish Saviour - Gary. He hand-builds this excellent piece of kit, which allows you, if you need, to have slight modifications made at the time of manufacture. You just slot your tube into the sleeve and off you go. Hand rotating, sure, but hand rotating made easy. Gary can even get the tube for you at a good price.
So there you go. A mount that can handle fairly considerable head loads, especially when guyed. It's also likely, in all but the worst cases of neighbour wars, to escape too much attention from the planning department - always a welcome benefit.
Indeed, you can fit a steel sleeve into concrete in the ground, and simply plonk your mount in and out as you wish. Although the mount won't stay up for long without the sleeve, you may well be able to argue that the mount is held in place by its own weight, so is not attached to land, so is not development.
The price of the standard mount is currently (June 2013) £175. Slight modifications will add about £40 to the price tag. Delivery in both cases extra. In reality, you'd be unlikely to save much money if you made it yourself.
UPDATE: July 2013
On looking in detail at the delivered product, all the above holds true but there were a few serious problems of design.
(1) A bar had been put in to support the pole at the bottom of the sleeve. Unfortunately, probably just an error, the winching cable had a loop and collet fitted on the top side of the bar, meaning the support pole would rest on the cable, rendering it both a bit wonky and very likely to wear the cable away over time. There was no real need for the bar - the pole can just rest or be supported above the sleeve with a collar.
(2) The box section support post is much too short. It should be at least about 2m above ground, even better at 3m. Being short, the antenna pole will put an unnecessarily high load on the mount, and doesn't allow much headroom when the pole is folded over - very inconvenient in a garden used for other things.
These issues vary according to user, but in general, they are changes needed for most users. A little bit more development and customer feedback, and it'll get there. Ultimately, I decided to dismantle the sleeve and entirely redo the support so that it's longer and has a cable attached to the bottom of the support pole, not the sleeve, affording much greater leverage.
