Echo what an earlier poster said about weight.  I've schlepped an FT-100 and a pair of 7ah batteries around the Blue Ridge, and after a day of it I start really thinking about an 817 or one of those cheap little MFJ jobbies. :-)

I would run a strip of grounding braid from the shield side of the NMO in the trunklid over to some convenient bolt that goes through the unibody.  Scrape away the paint around the bolt so you get good metal/metal contact with the braid.  That ought to help, I think.

So with Rohn on the rocks at the moment (and maybe for the long haul), who becomes the vendor of choice for affordable towers?

Update:  I sat down last Saturday and put one together.  Spent about $20 for parts at Home Depot and Radio Shack, and about an hour and a half of my afternoon building the thing (kept getting distracted by the Gators losing to Tennessee :-( ).  Went together fairly easily and worked well.

The current September issue of QST has an article on a dualband collinear antenna for 2m and 70cm. Looks like a good, inexpensive antenna.  I'm planning on building it in the next week or two.

Thanks for the pointer to the Icom groups, Caity.  I'll check 'em out.

And thanks to the folks that emailed me pointers to preamp circuits. I've since re-read the owner's manual (if at first you don't succeed, read the directions!) and found the schematic for the HM-10. :-)

I have an Icom IC-255A 2m rig in my shack, which I was shortsighted enough to acquire sans microphone.  The IC-255A is one of the older rigs that used the HM-10 mic with the built-in preamp.  After a long and fruitless search for anyone willing to let go of an HM-10 I picked up a Radio Shack dynamic mic.  I had at one time a link to a quick-and-dirty preamp, but that page has alas gone 404 on me.  So, prior to reinventing the wheel, has anyone got a quick/cheap little preamp already done up for this situation?

As for why, I'd be a little concerned about water migrating into the coax of the driven element, either thru the ends or at the open braid joint where the feedline braid is soldered to the element, should its waterproofing fail.  I was also thinking WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor, for those unfamiliar with this model railroading technical term :-) ) - just the forest of pipe would be somewhat more aesthetically tolerable than a forest of pipe with a bunch of wires taped to it :-).

I hadn't considered bamboo, largely because noplace nearby sells the stuff.  And I'm not really looking for super permanence, hence the "cheap" aspect.  I've got a pvc-pipe (grey sched 40) quad up now, and wanted a quick-n-dirty Yagi with which to compare it.  A more permanent long-term Yagi solution would obviously be aluminum tubing, but that'll have to wait until I've got more than about 10 bucks to throw at the hobby (wife sensitive to expenditures after just buying a HT and an FT-100, don'tcha know).

I came across an intriguing article in the October 1999 QST about easy 50 ohm matching of wire-element beams.  Doing a little mental math I guesstimated I could put 3 or 4 elements up on 6 meters for somewhere around $10 in pipe parts.  Given the near constant rain here in north Florida, I had the idea of putting the wire elements *inside* grey pvc or tan cpvc 1/2" pipe, instead of taping it to the outside of the pipe as the article mentioned.  Assuming I shorten the elements to compensate   for dielectric effects as the article indicates, is there any problem with having the elements inside the pipe protected from the rain?

Is anyone out there using Ray Goff's marvelous CW training software under Wine on a linux box?  When I run it everything works *except* the "proof text" output field.  It doesn't display what it sent, so it's very difficult to check accuracy of my copy.

I live in north Florida, where summertime means plenty of thunderstorms.  I'm looking a a modest colleciton of antennas fed with coax.  The coax cables are going to run into a metal box on the wall and through lightning arrestors.

I'm in something of a quandry.  About the only convenient place I have to bring my antenna coax lines into the house would have me driving a ground rod for the lightning protection just a few feet away from the gas meter.  Is there any hazard with having a lightning strike grounded near a gas meter?