I know I’ve been sailing close to the edge with regards to antennas; having the Cobweb, the 30m inverted V, the Moxon and my W3DZZ was pushing it, especially the more recent addition of the Moxon, which combined with a small rotator is on a twenty five foot pole that I have attached to a swing arm, so that I can raise and lower at will, this way it's hidden from the nearby road.
Living in an area of oustanding beauty is not the ideal situation for a Radio Amateur, basically you have to be careful what you put up. Neighbours are not a problem in my case, but I am situated close to a pretty cotswold village and even I can see that masts all over the place sometimes do not fit in with their surrounds.
The only place I could fit the Moxon mast was parallel to our washing line which has been fine for the past few weeks, but my XYL out in the garden the other day served me with a cautionary warning that the garden was beginning to look like an eye sore and there was no way come the spring the washing was going to swing next to that dirty old antenna when in the resting position!
Living in an area of oustanding beauty is not the ideal situation for a Radio Amateur, basically you have to be careful what you put up. Neighbours are not a problem in my case, but I am situated close to a pretty cotswold village and even I can see that masts all over the place sometimes do not fit in with their surrounds.
The only place I could fit the Moxon mast was parallel to our washing line which has been fine for the past few weeks, but my XYL out in the garden the other day served me with a cautionary warning that the garden was beginning to look like an eye sore and there was no way come the spring the washing was going to swing next to that dirty old antenna when in the resting position!
As no doubt many an amateur will realise you can only goes so far in designing and erecting antennas, there is a fine line between keeping your land/garden tidy or a mess, and you’ll soon know when you’ve crossed the line! My XYL is pretty good when it comes to the antennas, not everybody likes to see a forty foot mast with a Cobweb antenna attached to their house or a load of wire stretching from tree to tree and although she has no interest whatsoever in my radio hobby she puts up with my antics.
So the Moxon is going to have to be removed, but in all fairness I really cannot complain, it was an experimental project purely for 10 meters and it worked reasonably well, but 10 meters is at present fairly quiet and besides I have the Cobweb and W3DZZ to play with and providing I remove the Moxon I reckon I will be able to replace it with a vertical, so long as it doesn’t interfere with any washing!
I still fancy constructing a vertical specifically for 30 meter band; which will mean I can also remove the inverted V, better to have a single pole than the two extra wires hanging off the Cobweb mast.
For the moment the weather has not yet changed to be so warm as to hang out the washing, so at least I have a number of weeks to plan what I’m going to do.
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