Keeping Good Neighbors -- With A Vertical:

        "Good fences make good neighbors" wrote Robert Frost in the poem, Mending Wall. Large beam antennas usually don't, in suburban America.

        When I decided to get back into ham radio (by which I mean HF operation) after a lapse of several decades hard at work, I had to decide what kind of antenna I should raise in my well-manicured neighborhood. I surveyed all my neighbors' homes, and found that the roofs no longer held antennas -- everyone, without exception, had cable. The argument that a beam antenna is just a big TV antenna no longer had any force.

        I like my neighbors and I think they like me. I was not about to enforce my right to erect a two or three element beam on them. What would look beautiful to me would certainly look awful to them. And I would constantly hear about that from them. Another consideration, of course, was that there were so many large trees nearby that a beam would lose its effectiveness.

        After reading every antenna book published by the ARRL and the RSGB, I settled on the vertical as the best antenna for me under the circumstances. Pictures of the all-band, commercially designed verticals looked as bad as the yagis -- from my neighbors' point of view -- with their bulging traps, horizontal members and spider canopies. Then I saw the High Sierra antenna, and knew I had found the solution: my roof came with a ready-made base support for that antenna's mounting bracket - the iron plumbing vent or standpipe that sticks up through the roof.

        I was able to mate the vent pipe to the mounting bracket, as shown in this photo. The board is 1" thick plywood, held to the mounting bracket with stainless bolts and nuts, with three hardware store variety U-bolts holding the wood to the vent pipe. Unfortunately, no saddles came with the U-bolts, so I doubled up on the straps.

        This motorized vertical antenna requires a good counterpoise or multiple radials. First, I tried a 16 foot counterpoise, which I fed down into the vent. My Yaesu FT-897 lets me know when the SWR is above 3:1, and it clearly told me that this counterpoise alone would not do the job. However, I was still able to get a workable SWR on three bands: 30, 17 and 12 meters, using the FT-897 antenna tuner.

        Next, I drilled and tapped a 9/64 inch hole in the iron vent, and ran a heavy copper wire from a lug on the bolt to the mounting bracket. Now I could tune all bands from 80 to 10 meters, but the SWR was still higher than I wished on four bands: 20, 15, 12 and 10 meters. On the lower three bands, 80/75, 40 and 30 meters, the SWR was so low that there wasn't even an indication of reflected energy on display.

        Finally, I mounted the eight 8-foot radials on the roof. This was not an easy job for an old, fat man on a 30 degree slope. But with a safety rope in one hand and silicone sealant in the other, I was able to slip the ends of the radials under the shingles and apply a squirt of sealant under each shingle, hoping it would harden enough to keep the radials from slipping out. So far this has held well. My 60-year old house was not designed for the radials, but I spaced them as best I could, with the lowest radial hanging over the gutter.

        With the three types of ground substitutes -- counterpoise, vent pipe and radials -- I can now tune the Sequoia antenna with its motor alone. The antenna tuner is disconnected. The SWR is very low on all bands, and, as before, the reflected energy doesn't show up on the display on some of the bands.

        "Since the vent is on the back side of the roof, the antenna cannot be seen from the street side of the house. The surrounding trees mostly block the view of the antenna from the sides. Only if one is standing in the back yard can the antenna be seen. Running 100 watts, I have not yet had any complaints about RFI from the neighbors -- perhaps because they cannot tell that I have a ham radio station. With limited operation, I have had good reports from California, Miami and Brazil on 17 and 20 meters, which have been mostly lousy lately.

        So far, everyone is happy.

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