Part 2 - 6 band hexbeam antenna construction

Research

Like with any projects I do I do a very serious research to see what am I dealing with. I cannot simply jump into a project and "go with the flow", I have to understand and control the process from the beginning to the end.

Google is your friend. As they say you can find on Google everything about everything these days. I remember the days when we paid big bucks to have fancy encyclopedias on the shelf. My parents had a huge library, my father collected several engineering books in 3 different languages. By now all those are outdated and not worth anything. In 50 years not only the world turned around, but all the professions engineering changed so much that what I studied 27 years ago now is almost irrelevant. But Goggle has answers for everything.

So I started searching, reading, searching, and reading more. I right away cam across of two excellent resources:

A very good collection of resources:
http://www.karinya.net/g3txq/hexbeam/

The designer of the broadband hexa beam antenna:
http://www.leoshoemaker.com/hexbeambyk4kio/general.html

A European site with a very nice design and lots of installation videos:
http://www.g3txq-hexbeam.com/

Beside these I jumped on youtube as well and searched for videos demonstrating how the antenna works and how it all comes together.

With the help of my trustee mentor Mike (VA3MW) we decided that we will do the following:

- I will build a hexa beam for 6 bands: 6m, 10m, 12m, 15m, 17m and 20m bands.
- Mike will help me mount it on to my chimney to replace the existing IMAX2000 10 meter antenna.
- Beside the antenna, antenna parts and feed-line we will need an antenna rotor, a rotor controller and we will need abut 120 feet of antenna rotor cable as well.

I was debating on buying a complete antenna kit for close to 700 dollars plus shipping, handling and taxes - or I can get the parts and build it myself. Looking at the available budget for this project the second option seem to give me more financial room. At the end I will still probably spend around 700, but that should be the whole cost including the rotor and the mounts.

So here we are, we started ordering parts for this project. The next section will specify what and from where.