I received my Zero Five 80m Ground Plane antenna today. It’s a 43ft vertical with 6 10ft radials at the bottom. I’ve installed it on a pole 9ft up so the radials clear my fruit trees. I’ve been playing around with it a little and it’s got great reception, I might have to do some work on the cabling to get the transmit to work a little better but I see I got to Japan with FT8 at +14db. Hearing lots of Japan stations on 17m. Here’s some pics:
I “Called before you dig” and got a clear from all 5 utilities with buried stuff in my area. I think only the power company came out:
I dug a hole 4 feet deep and added a 12″ tube to fill with concrete. It took 6 50lb bags to fill it.
I purchased a 21ft 1 1/2 galvanized schedule 40 water pipe and had it cut to 13ft so it was more manageable to attach to my car. The Zero Five website lists the antenna accepting 1 7/8″ pipe which is 1.85″, but 1 1/2″ pipe is 1.9 inches OD. I had a similar issue with my hexbeam where I took the measurements super literally and ordered an expensive pipe online with the exact dimensions it didn’t fit perfectly, later I learned it was designed to fit cheap water pipe. So I called Zero Five and Tom let me know that it is actually just over 1.9″ and would fit.
Here’s how the antenna looks disassembled.
It’s really well put together. Someone commented online that you could build one cheaper but I doubt it, there’s a lot of different size tubing and just in the time savings alone it’s worth it. From unboxing to getting it on the pole was only about 30 mins.
I got on one ladder and Amanda W4MMY got on the other and helped guide it on the pole. With no wind today it was easy, a lot easier than the Hexbeam was.
The radials took another 20 minutes to install.
It’s not an ugly antenna like the Hexbeam (which looks like a clothes drying rack).
It’s recommended to use 100ft of coax to hook it up, I’m just using the hexbeam cable (which has a ferrite choke on it) for now, I’ll fix that in the coming days as I get my single panel ground installed. We had a tropical storm (Eta) come through earlier this week, knocked over two of my Papaya trees, but the weather looks clear for at least a week so I’m not in a rush to get it grounded. I have 2 ground rods I’m going to put in and I bought a ground rod attachment for my hammer drill so it should be much easier than the last time. There’s a hamfest tomorrow and I’m going to keep my eye out for a remote tuner, then I don’t need the 100ft of coax and the cable losses should be removed. Look for me this weekend on the WAE RTTY contest. I shooting for having my shack totally setup by the end of the month for my favorite contest, CQ WW CW.