After having a problem with the 75m bazooka I decided to put up a fan dipole for the winter. The bazooka, which was made of two pieces of RG-213 soldered in the middle, failed this fall. I believe the solder joint came apart inside the conduit body that it was epoxied into. I was looking at putting up a remote coax switch and running multiple bazookas. This gives me multiple bands on one feedline without the switch. It is resonant on 160m, 75m, and 40m. It also happens to work on several other bands as well. I can move quite a bit on 75 and 160, very much to my surprise.
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| Center spreaders, support, and feed insulator. |
The next two photos are of the wire legs, fiberglass rod spreaders, and strain insulators on the ends.
I cut down driveway reflectors to use the rods as the spreaders, they seem to work well so far.
Sep. 2016 Update:
After 5 years of service, I have a failure. Well, sort of. One of the dogs chewed a guy rope off and my daughter got into the wire with the tractor while mowing. This caused some of the fiberglass rods to split. The center insulators took the abuse, but I will have to take the entire antenna down to measure and replace the elements that got chopped and wound up in the tractor mower.
