"John Ferrell" wrote in message
...


I'd never heard of a messenger rope. Sounds interesting. How is the
messenger rope secured to the antenna line? WB8YKH

More properly "messenger line".

This seems to be a difficult item to search so I will attempt to an
explanation...

When two ships meet at sea and wish to transfer items from one ship to
another (think mail, movies, etc.) they must keep a safe distance
between them. The accepted procedure is to throw or otherwise launch a
small rope or line from one to the other. Then a larger line is
attached to the small line and pulled back to the originating ship.
There may be several iterations of this until a line strong enough to
carry the ultimate load is in place. The first line (and may be the
interim lines) that were used to get the final line in place are
refferred to as messenger lines.

I sometimes use a weighted piece of fishing line as the meesenger and
tie the string/rope/wire in place to hang an antenna. It saves a lot
of snagging if you streamline the attaching knot with a bit of tape.

If anyone manages to figure out a search that provides useful results
for "messenger line" I would appreciate the enlightenment!

John Ferrell W8CCW

John while what you describe is correct, it is not the type of messanger
rope, line, or cable that is being thought of.

In the antenna case, it is a strong rope that is streached between two
supports. To this rope is attached a lighter antenna. Say you only have
some number 20 wire and want to make an 80 meter dipole. If you string the
# 20 wire and attach some rg-8 type coax to the middle of it, it would
probalby not stay up very long. Also you would have to have a large drop in
the middle as you can not streachit very tight without breaking.
If you have a strong rope you can tape and use some ultraviolet resistant
wire ties to attach the antenna wire to the rope and then pull it up
tighter.

I have a tower up 60 feet with several beams on it. While it may not be the
recommended practice, I came off the tower around the 40 foot level and ran
the coax (4 coax +rotor cable) to the house about 50 feet away. I used a
piece of guy wire and taped and ty wrapped the cable to the the guy wire. I
pulled this guy wire tight enough to keep the cable off the ground. This
particular guy wire is not one of the supporting guys, but just a 'messanger
wire' to hold up the coax with out strssing the coax.