Version 2.2 of the Moxon antenna is ready for a calm day to test. It has been very breezy here of late but expecting good weather tomorrow to try and set this up again. Version 2.2 has a newly printed Hub. The last hub was made with PLA and cracked after 24 hours. The new hub is printed in PETG with an Octet infill. I also designed the center to nominally be at the 7m Spiderpole height. I can add an adapter now to move it up to 9m with no other changes to the hub.
Printing the hub in PETG took 20 hours and uses up about half a roll of filament. Warping looked well under control for about 60% of the print. I started noticing some small warping at the ends. When the print was complete both ends had about 1mm of warp. This was enough to through the pole adapter holes out of round by about 1mm. I modified the pole adapters by this amount and reprinted them in PETG. They now slide in quite nicely and are held in place with #6 screws.
I had difficulty on the last go around in the pole adapters fit to tightly inside the fishing poles. One of the pole tip adapters would not come out of the fishing pole. I used a 3/16″ piece of steel rod from Home Depot to pound it out with little difficulty. I plan to sand down the pole adapters a bit before the next setup but they will likely still fit a bit too tightly.
I also opened up the holes on the wire clamps to give me a bit more freedom to adjust the wires on the fishing poles. These I printed in PLA as before.
My current plan for tomorrow is to setup the 15m Moxon at 23 feet. I am going to attempt to adjust the pole tension this time using Kevlar kite string with the intent of have the fishing poles in an “upside-down umbrella” configuration. Pretty much every Moxon I see on the internet has the poles bent in this fashion. I do this with the poles at full length for 20m. Once this is set I’ll add the wire elements and start testing.
Adventures in Amateur Radio 