How to Spend a Weekend on a Roof

So.

About that Meme Monday.

I was up on the roof for this:

Yes, I finally set up an outside antenna for my VHF/UHF transceiver. It was certainly an adventure.

For starters, I had to wait for the roof to be replaced before I could even start, so there was that...

Note the siding that still needed to be reattached.

Then there were family things I had to take care of, so that set me back yet another week. Then I had to wait for the weather to turn nice for several days before I could begin. 

***

Let me get this out of the way right now: I'm scared of heights. 

I never knew that until the day (over 30 years ago) that my wife and I decided to walk across the Roebling Suspension Bridge just for the view.

From Facebook's Old Cincinnati group.
It's a much better pic than I've ever taken.

About halfway across, my brain started freaking out because I didn't think that the fence would keep me from falling over if, oh, my brain decided I wanted to lean over the edge. 

I'm sure it's legal --or it was at one point-- but yeah, that fence
doesn't look like the safest thing out there. Especially for kids.
From Travel Inspired Living.

So yeah, I got only about 1/3 of the way over before I had to turn back. Ever since, I've had issues about being in high places, such as up on a roof. Conquering that meant getting up on our garage's roof to put up that antenna. 

***

If you're familiar with radio or television antennas, you know that you want them as high as possible. Therefore, I ought to put it up on the roof of the house, not the garage. However, I was willing to get up on the garage's roof, NOT our house's roof. Besides, I don't even have a ladder long enough to do that. My ladder only goes up 24 feet, which is about 3-4 feet short of being useful. Why the small ladder? That's because we bought it to use at our first house, not our current one.

Yeah, to hell with getting on top of the house. A garage roof antenna will have to do.

The mast I used for mounting was made of 304 stainless steel, so I wouldn't have to worry about rust so much.

The other prep work, running the coax from what was the girls' room to the far side of the garage, took a LOT longer than I thought it would. I'm not going to show any pics, because who wants to see the inside of the garage attic? Let's just say that once I was done with running that coax, I was more than ready to shower and wash my hair.

All that coax work took Saturday, so Sunday was set aside for the roof itself. 

And, as is traditional for me, I had to make some adjustments on the fly.

See that wooden base? Or rather, the TWO of them?

Yeah, I miscalculated on the orientation of the wood so I could attach the mount properly. If I had rotated the mount, it would be sticking out at a 50 degree angle rather than vertically, so I had to cut another 2"x6" pressure treated piece of wood, paint that, then coat it in the Gorilla Glue equivalent of Flex-Seal, then use some putty underneath to properly seal the holes as I punctured my nice new roof. 

Although I assembled the mast and the antenna before climbing up onto the roof, I had to attach the two together while up there. Then attach the combined antenna and mast to the base.

So I went up the ladder. Down the ladder. Up the ladder. Down the ladder. 

Yeah, that was fun. /sarcasm

Once that was complete and the antenna kinda-sorta vertical*, I then had to spend about 5-10 minutes moving all of my tools and equipment back off the roof and back down to the deck before I could tackle attaching the coax (and the ground wire) to the bonded ground rod below.

The device the two pieces of coax are attached
to is the lightning arrestor, which shunts energy
to ground in the event of a nearby lightning strike.
If there's a direct strike, well, not much you can
do there, but it will protect against indirect strikes.

So this is what it looked like when I was finished:

Yes, I know, I need to attach the
coax and the ground wire to the siding.
I've got a few days before the next storm.

The little loop there on the antenna is for both strain relief and provides a little bit of an RF choke. If I wanted to really choke any common mode current on the coax, I'd have to use something quite a bit more robust than a single loop. I'll probably have to consider a choke at the entrance to the girls' room, which I've claimed as my radio room for the time being.

Somewhere along the line I noticed that I'd scraped up my hands a bit and I was bleeding all over my right thumb's knuckle. (Sorry, I'm not showing any pics.) My left index finger's knuckle was bleeding too and hurt far more, but the right knuckle was the one that made me grateful I'm up on my tetanus shots.

Anyway, once everything was attached I went into the house and checked the SWR.

The SWR, or Standing Wave Ratio, checks for the amount of power being transmitted versus being reflected back into the radio from the antenna. If an antenna isn't matched properly to the frequency you're transmitting on, some of that transmitting power will be reflected back into the transceiver. That ratio is ideally 1:1, but you can probably get away with a 2:1 ratio before you start to worry about frying your transceiver by transmitting with a poorly matched antenna. Newer transceivers do have protection circuits, but I'd rather not find out the hard way that mine don't.

Anyway, I tested the SWR, and got a 1.1:1, which given the hoops I went through to connect and mount the damn thing, is very much a miracle. (Or I had the meter miscalibrated.)

I did get on the 2 meter National Calling Frequency and requested a mic check...

I didn't have the lights on in the room, or it
would have been a better photo.

...and I almost immediately got a response from someone in West Harrison, Indiana, about 14-15 miles away. He told me I was booming in from where he was at, and we chatted briefly before I told him I had to go shower and clean myself off.

Monday morning, I turned on the transceiver and listened around the repeaters, and I was getting reception from about 40-50 miles away without much issue. I didn't try to talk to anybody, because I was getting ready to work, but it was nice to know that I got far better reception than I did on my mobile antenna attached to a pizza pan.

***

Would I do it again?

Yes, absolutely, even with my fear of heights. In fact, my brain is already saying "You know, if you'd have gotten a bigger antenna or a longer mast, you could reach even father..." And my body has to tell it "NO EFFING WAY. NOT NOW." My right thumb was incredibly stiff and slightly swollen Monday morning, but it feels much better now. And Sunday night my back and legs were really feeling it, but they recovered by Monday evening. 

But no, I'm not adding to that antenna just yet. Some of my ham friends have asked me when I'm going to put a tower up, and I've laughed that off, but I do understand the appeal. And the cost, which single-handedly keeps me from being more interested.

*"Close enough for government work," I grumbled as I gave up and just accepted it wasn't going to be good enough for my standards.