"Personally I'd never put a rotor below standard mast guying rings. Maybe below ball bearings or greased bronze bushing rings, but not a steel against steel mast ring.
"
These aren't standard guying rings.
http://penninger.com/new_page_5.htmThey look like nylon on nylon which is pretty good.
I'd prefer a metal outer ring of some kind so that the thing was fail-safe to failure of the plastic, but then again, some nylon grades are awfully strong.
I've used plastic bushings on steel and plastic bushings on aluminum for this sort of thing with good results. I have mounted a few light fiberglass supported antennas on rotating masts simply because it makes it easy to walk the mast up. My 20m Moxon rectangle only weighs a few pounds. Putting even a TV rotator up there would probably triple the mast-head weight and make it hard to erect it without a fixture or a friend.
Agreed that standard guy rings would be terrible for this, but the Penninger slip rings look quite suitable.
Gary, Tom's right that you haven't given enough detail, but I think you're asking in the wrong place anyway.
When I was a teenager I built these things on the basis of two things:
1) It seems sturdy
2) If it falls, it falls only on me or my parents' property.
You can put up some pretty stupid stuff safely that way... safely in the sense that if it fails, the consequences are minor. That said, I never had a thousand dollar antenna to put on top of anything I "engineered" myself before I knew anything.
Now I can do my own stress calculations, at least estimates, and that gives me a lot more ability to build things that need to be failure-free, like a mast in a neighborhood.
I think you need some engineering help. I think you should get it from Penninger. You're going to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on their mast equipment.
But I get the impression that they've already sent you to the internet forums.
So I don't know what to tell you.
You're unlikely to find a mechanical good Samaritan on the internet forums in the way you can find people to do calculations for you regarding electrical or electronic matters.
I think you can build a rotating mast from Penninger parts that will hold either a HexBeam or a 2el SteppIR (though the latter might be heavy duty) but without some engineering calculations from someone...
I can advise that you should use their mast clamps instead of snap tubes and joiners. If you use snap tubes and joiners, the joints will be weaker than the masts. If you use those clamps with the three bolted ribs, the joints will be stronger than the masts.
This is the only thing I'm sure of.
I think the Penninger guy rings are probably OK.
But to assess the whole thing, you need to analyze the whole thing, antenna, mast, etc.
Penninger's not saving you any money over other options. If they won't tell you what mast components you need to hold your antenna, take your dollars to someone who has done appropriate engineering analysis on their products and can make windload recommendations!
Otherwise you're on your own or at the mercy of people willing to give structural engineering advice over the internet. It's too much of a liability issue for people to do it casually for free and give you a solid "yes" or a firm "no". I'll do it for myself, but I'm not going to do it for anyone else. I'm not an engineer.
Someone can design you a rotating mast that will hold your antennas but it takes time and work to do that and who better than the people you're already paying for the rotating mast?
Dan
