My 503.7kHz beacon is off air for a few days while I resite the mast holding one end of the Tee antenna.    The original mast was a Al scaffold pole screwed to a brick buttress strengthening the wall at the end of my garden.   Recently, and probably due to the prolonged spell of dry weather, I noticed that the buttress had been pulled away from the brick wall itself from the continuous tension pulling it outwards for the last 12 years.   Bricks keying the two parts had actually pulled apart!   The wall stayed solid, the buttress has moved to give a 2 - 3cm gap at the top.

 

So today,  mounted a 3m scaffold pole in the ground, and the existing 6m Al scaff pole will be fixed to the top of this, once the concrete has set.  This will be 2m higher at the far end, and the top hat will be 0.4m shorter   I'm going to remake the Tee antenna, with wider spacing top hat, and separating the two top arms and feeding with twin open wire feeder in the middle.   That way it  can function as a fat dipole on HF, or be strapped together for LF - MF.

 

The extra height should lead to another 1dB of ERP, but who knows what a new size top hat will do.   Or the new location of the mast marginally further from trees.

Andy
www.g4jnt.com