[Today’s run: 3.2; 2/22: 4.1; 2/24: 3.2; 2/26: 3.2; 3/1: 7.x, 3/3: 3.2, 3/5: 3.2; 3/8: 7.x]
About 10 days ago I started digging a hole in the bit of the back porch that has pea gravel in it, right outside my office window. I have two 10 ft sections of tower and a 1/2 section, all from last summers tower work.
So I was hoping to dig down about 4 feet. That was thwarted by wet sand that was slumping into the hole. So I stopped about 2 ft down and pushed the short section down into the heavy clay below the sand.
Over the weekend we had a project to build a couple of short house brackets to connect the tower to the house giving a bit more stability.
I did some work on that tonight and one bracket is finished and installed.
I hope to get the other bracket in, then finish up the top 4 inches of the hole with some concrete. That will help me avoid having to clip or pull weeds around the tower legs. Between the heavy clay stopping downward motion and the combination of the bottom anchoring in soil and concrete along with the house brackets, this should be fine for a 22′ tower. It should last until the rust eats off the tower legs.
The plan is to use this short tower for my uhf/vhf J-pole antenna, my GPS antenna and as the feed point for a wire antenna either of dipole or end-fed configuration and incorporating the taller tower and whatever other heights I can find as supports.