3 weeks after the installation - quite a storm with 80km winds...

For those who followed this blog till now, 3 weeks after the installation we had quite some storm this afternoon. About 18mm of rain in 20 minutes and winds and gusts up to 80km per hour.

When I saw the storm coming I was concerned. Look at the video below:

The bottom of the mast was resting on a 2x4 and the wind managed to slowly walk the mast off the 2x4 and bend the top and the bottom chimney mount brackets. I am not surprised, the antenna is quite heavy, the bottom mast is a 1.5" schedule 40, which is quite heavy.

At the end of the storm this is how the antenna looks like:

you can see it is leaning over the left. Hopefully it will stand over the next day or so till I weld up a much stronger chimney mount.

 

The idea is to get some 1" metal square tubes and weld them together to resemble the below design:

 

As you can see this will have 3 brackets, one on the bottom to make sure the bottom cannot slide out from it's position. For this we will weld a smaller pipe piece on the top of the bottom mount ant the mast will be inserted onto that.

 

The middle piece is shown a bit lower here, the exact location of that will be determined later.

Each end is overflowing the chimney with about 1-2 inches to allow me to drill a hole though which the screws on the end of the steel band will hold the assembly to the chimney.

 

Tomorrow I will have to measure the exact size of the chimney even though it is not critical, but I will prepare the brackets as designed by welding them together.