Ham op wrote:

John, you can use the wood or plastic insert without weather/winter
concerns. I used the wood insert for three years. I solved the
'winter' problem [I'm in NH and winter temperature runs to -10F] by
packing the space with fiberglass insulation. I used about 3 inches
thick and never had a cool breeze. I had to be careful about keeping
rain, etc. away fro the fiberglass [it swallows water very easily].

John N9JG wrote:

The non-removable screen has a narrow aluminum frame. My current plan
is to drill through the wood sill, and patch the holes (both interior
and exterior) when I leave.

The ground wire will be about 12 feet long, so for the higher bands
the ground will be ineffective unless I tune it. Actually, unless I
run the end of an antenna into the shack and load it against ground,
I should not need an rf ground.

Thanks for your comments and suggestions.


"Old Ed" wrote in message
ink.net...

Hi John,

It's too bad your window does not lend itself to the spacer-with-holes
approach, as I was also going to suggest that. Does that non-removable
screen have a wide frame? If so, maybe you could go through holes
in a window spacer, then through holes in the screen frame.

In any case, you could save yourself one of those holes in the wall by
letting your "ground" wire and the coax share one hole.

Better yet, you could forget about the "ground" wire altogether--at
least
if you have a third-wire ground in your AC sockets. A long "ground"
wire will be too puny and inductive to be any kind of RF ground. And
if you have a power ground through the AC socket, adding a parallel
ground path will just confuse things, increase your lightning risk, and
possibly put you into a code violation.

I have only AC-socket power grounds in my second floor shack, and
I run QRO on 80 through 10 with no problems.

73, Ed, W6LOL





A few years back we had a house fire and I had them leave a soft spot in
the wall with a cover plate on the inside. This spring I managed to
have the antenna installed but last winter we didn't have any problem
with cold and it gets to -40 up here (-40 is the same in F or C).

Paul