I have been waiting a while for the weather to finally improve here in Steinthal so I could finish putting up my amateur radio antenna. There’s an old TV antenna tower next to my house that has been sitting there just waiting for an update and I decided to start the process on Sunday. I was finally able to climb up the tower and hang a multiband dipole wire antenna.
The Alpha Delta DX-CC Multiband dipole
The installation took a while longer that I thought, with a big part of the project requiring a 1 inch hole being drilled into the stone masonry of my house right outside my office. While that was a chore, the most daunting part of the day was realizing just how long the copper grounding rods are which need to be driven into the ground and hooked up to the radio in order to prevent or at least diminish the possibility of a catastrophic electrocution. That sucker was 10 feet long! I started hitting it with a hammer while on a ladder and slowly but surely was able to get nearly the entire rod into the ground! After hooking it up to my radio and with only one arm of the dipole up and the other on the ground, I ran into the office to see what I could hear. I was able to hear a guy in Clarke County, Virginia (857 miles from me) and decided to give him a call. IT WORKED!!! So after that, I headed back out and finished putting up the rest of the antenna and I am officially up and running on the air again after nearly 25 years of absence!
The 10 foot grounding rod that I pounded into the ground..
Drilling the hole for the coax..
