Fibreglass Poles
I mentioned in my previous post that I had taken down my Fibreglass Poles that I had used as a mast for my Diamond V2000 collinear and later my Diamond A430S10R2 10 element yagi. Of course, my thoughts then went to ask myself, how I re-utilise these poles. Just to recap, I had six individual fibreglass poles each with a polypropylene insert projecting from the top, giving an appearance similar to swaged aluminium poles. These were supposedly NATO tent poles. However, any coating that had originally been there having degraded over time in the sunlight had left glass strands exposed. My Fibreglass Poles needed to be painted.
I searched on Google to see if anyone had tried to paint fibreglass. My first instinct was to use Hammerite. However, I found comments on the internet that Hammerite does not adhere to fibreglass. Nevertheless, there were comments that masonry paint will adhere to fibreglass and that in fact, some people paint the decks of their fibreglass boats with masonry paint. Certainly, my experience in using masonry paint on rendered external walls had been that it adheres to silicone sealant and to uPVC window frames enabling fine detailing with weather protection. What is more, I had half a 5-litre tine of Leyland masonry paint in magnolia in the shed. A few hours later I had painted four pole sections with several coats and they were dry. It is quite surprising how quickly water-based masonry paint dries in the sun with a light breeze.
These pictures show my resonant end-fed half-wave wire antenna supported at the remote end by my painted fibreglass poles and at the transceiver end by the uPVC gutter. I used a 20.2-metre length of Sotabeams lightweight wire which easily fits through the hinge side of the double glazed window in the radio room. John Parfrey M0UKD has some excellent wire length calculators on his website – https://m0ukd.com/ .
Just for information, the height of the end-fed half-wave wire is 17 feet or 5.2 meters at the gutter and at the Fibreglass Poles and a little higher where supported by the tree in the middle.
