G5RV half-size for motorhome
THE ANTENNA:
It's basically a dipole with 25 ft. 6 in. on each leg. The lead-in consists of 14 ft. of 300-ohm twin lead, then 50-ohm coax from there to the tuner. Solder the center to one side and the braid to the other. Be sure and waterproof it well. You DO need a tuner. The antenna tunes quite well from 6 to 30 mHz.
MAST:
I made mine out of good fir 1x2s. You'll be sorry if you cheap out and use
spruce. I put two ¼" bolts through the overlap to hold them. Then, you just spread the feet apart as far as they will go without breaking them.
I think mine are about 14 to 18 inches apart. The 2x4s are about 8 inches long and are glued with epoxy or GE 5200 to the top of the rear air conditioner.
I put one bolt through each so that it swivels forward and the top of the assembly rests on the forward air conditioner.
There are many other arrangements that might work better for you. I just taped the 300-ohm twin-lead to the side of the 1x2s.
It is guyed with heavy-duty dacron line from the cross-bar forward and aft.
When you raise it up, you just have to tie off the aft guy to something. I leave about 25 feet of string attached at all times to each leg of the antenna.
Just loop the wire and tie the string - no insulators. When I drop the antenna forward, I loop the string back and forth around the rear bumper a couple of times and tie it off.
The whole procedure takes about 2½ minutes. I keep another several lengths of string
in a sawed-off bleach bottle. Then, if I need extra, I have it right there handy.
One thing about string -- if you feed it in there starting at one end, it is guaranteed to come right back out in reverse order.
So take a felt pen and color the ends for an inch or so. Then you'll be able to find the end first.
I even whip the ends with thread so they don't frey.
INSULATOR:
The reason for all the holes is so it can be either suspended from an object from the top, suspended between two trees, or screwed to the wooden mast.
Mine is screwed to the top of the 1x2 through the two offset holes in the bottom portion.
That leaves the wires just above the mast. I use crimp connectors for the connection to the bolts as it makes a cleaner connection.
Solder if you wish. Put some sort of weather-proof protection on the connections when you're done.
I hope I have covered everything. If not, you know how to get me.
73,
Jack
VE3EED