"Gary Smith" wrote in
:

Hi, i am a new ham and i just purchased an old VP commodore station
wagon. I was wondering what the best method would be mounting antennas
on this vehicle. It has a non metallic roof rack so i was thinking of
getting a metal plate across the roof rack and mounting the antennas
on that. So i was thinking:

The VP commodore is about 15 years old now.

You haven't stated why you don't want to put holes in the roof. Most
people with a car of that age, if it of average value for its age, would
put holes in the roof without hesitation.

It is a little difficult to comment on your plate proposal, how big is
it, how will you prevent wind noise, vibration, failure etc.

If the plate is not large enough, you really have one antenna with four
feedpoints. One could argue that the entire roof of the wagon is only
just large enough to accomodate all the antennas you propose.

You could feed coax in between the door and door seals, but it is
inconvenient and fraught with problems (cable damage, water ingress etc).

Unless the car is of some special value, I would place holes in the roof,
spaced out down the centreline. Get someone experienced to help you find
where to cut the holes so that they have room underneath, so you can
route the cables down the windscreen pillar, and without dropping a hot
piece of metal (eg the donut after holesawing the roof) through the
headlining.

There are commercial dual band antennas sold here, but I would skip the
MobileOne product. Look at the Diamonds and the like, but they require a
proprietary base. Your other antennas will probably go on a vanilla
5/16" brass thread stud base.

If you don't want to put too many holes in the roof, you could place one
good 2m/70cm antenna with the base just behing the interior light, and
put the other two on Z brackets on the front mudguards.

I was wondering why you need the chook band when you have 2m and 70cm, 2m
and 70cm seem like they are half way to CB here, certainly the lingo is
strongly CB.

73 or 1004, or whatever they say on air these days.
Owen