Home mounting of WiFi antenna - advice sought for a too-short antenna mast

I went to Midas today. They have pipe that is EXACTLY the same size, but, it MUST be welded (as you noted).

Just dropping the EMT pipe inside seems easier than welding. And stronger if I bolt it in (as you also noted).

Today I picked up a 10-foot length of 1" EMT which fits loosely inside the DirectTV J arm bracket. They don't sell smaller lengths! :(

Reply to
J.G.
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Are you sure they're stainless and not electroplated steel? Use a magnet. I've been fooled a few times. If it sticks, it's electroplated steel. If it doesn't, it's probably stainless. (Note: There are magnetic stainless compositions, but they're not commonly used for hardware).

Some of the larger J mounts have additional support arms like this:

Looks like you have the mount, but not the arms.

No. The typical DBS dish has a stopper at the top of the mounting clamps.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Ugly, but functional. If you don't want to weld the two pipes together, think about using epoxy or other glue. However, I would weld as the thermal expansion and contraction will eventually crack the glue joint.

You can't directly bolt it to the J mount. If you run a bolt or two through both pipes, you're likely to crush the pipes when tightened. You'll need to cram a spacer inside the 1" EMT to allow the bolt to be properly tightened. Two small bolts, such as what's at the bottom of the J mount will also work, but you'll have a difficult time fishing it into the middle of the assembly.

Please remember that you have but one life to give for your internet access.

I'm familiar with the situation. When the county renewed the contract with Comcast last year, they were forced to add service to several marginal areas. Basically, anyone that complained sufficiently loudly to the county got service. Those that didn't, such as most of the summit area, got nothing. This should be a clue as to how things are done. Next chance is July 2014.

I have customers and accomplices with the same situation in the Aptos hills. Exede (Wild Blue) is slightly slower in the Aptos area because it's at the border of the spot beam. It also wanders a bit, varying somewhat with what I guess is signal strength. I've been doing remote maintenance (using Teamviewer) to several Exede systems. There's a bit of a delay, but since it's a very constant delay, it's easy to accommodate. VoIP requires saying "over" at the end of each "transmission", but is totally functional. For fun, I called Exede customer service via VoIP. No problems. Here's another users experience:

The big question is whether the customer can dump AT&T POTS in favor of VoIP via Exede. The jury is still out but I'm lobbying for pulling the plug.

I did a 50 ladder climb to the 3rd floor to realign a HughesNet dish on a tile roof. I'll never do that again. No problem once on the roof, but the ladder was really bouncy. Later, I was told that the correct way was to tie a 20ft ladder at midpoint to form a bipod to stabilize the ladder.

If you're not sure of yourself, throw a heavy climbing rope (11mm) over the top of the roof and down to the ground on the opposite side. Tie it to a tree or something that will take your weight. Borrow a sit harness (not just a belt) and tie yourself in. If you can't handle the knots, get a rescue ascender/descender such as:

There should be plenty of tree climbers, wood butchers, or arborists in the area. Bug me if you want names.

The hard part is not going to be mounting the dish. It's going to be aiming and aligning the dish. Unless you're tied into the rafters, I don't think the J-mount tied to the eaves is going to be strong enough.

Don't forget to waterproof the exposed connectors. I wrap them with teflon tape, and then cover the teflon tape with electrical tape. A layer of clear coat acrylic paint (Krlyon) for UV protection and to keep the tape from unraveling in the sun.

Can't you find a better or easier location? Something at the roof peak would be easier to work with.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I'm going to circulate THAT at the next local homeowners meeting to see if we can get everyone to complain!

Maybe that's all we need to get cable in the mountains!

Reply to
J.G.

While the neighbors who have added Exede are happy with the speed, and they knew about the latency problem beforehand, the one thing that will kill them is the bandwidth caps.

WISPs out here typically do not limit bandwidth.

Reply to
J.G.

Why not just get the correct mount for the eaves? There's only so much fabrication before it's cheaper, easier, and better to get the right mounting hardware.

or see my original posting.

If you're not a believer, calculate the wind load on the dish at your maximum expected wind gusts. Clamp the mount into a bench vice, attach a load cell, and pull on the mount at the calculated tension. On big installs, I actually do this.

The Rocket dish is about 1 meter in diameter.

Handy spreadsheet:

Use the 2nd tab for a solid dish.

60 mph = 97 km/hr From the graph for a 1 meter dish, that's 750 newtons or 169 lbs.

Can your modified mount survive a 169 lb pull at the middle of the dish? I don't think so. Note that the wind load varies with the square of the wind speed, so getting max wind speed is fairly important.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

That's a wonderful idea.

The Ubiquiti dish came with all stainless steel bolts. Do you still wrap them if they're all stainless steel?

Reply to
J.G.

Funny you should mention the rope.

I bought a 100' length from the local surplus store on Winchester, along with a harness. When I bought it, I had thought the harness was a climbing harness - but it was actually a 'safety' harness.

Also, I was wondering HOW to anchor the rope at the top - but I had not thought about just throwing it over the house. That's a GREAT idea!

I'm not sure what the ascenders are for because I was planning on climbing the ladder with the rope tied to me just in case I fell.

I guess you're intimating I don't need the ladder ... and, well, it 'is' steeply sloped so that might not be a bad idea.

Reply to
J.G.

About 1 millisecond after I hit send, I found that I had goofed. I hate it when that happens. The wind load should be:

From the graph for a 1 meter dish, that's 187 newtons or 42 lbs.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Interesting.

I put a neodymium button magnet on the shiny bolts and it was slightly sticky. Strangely enough, the magnet would stick slightly to some bolts, enough to stay on, but in others it would just slide off.

It stuck like glue to the painted steel but didn't have any attraction at all for the stainless steel hose clamp that came with the assembly ... so there's something very different about the bolts and nuts.

Reply to
J.G.

Oh. That makes sense.

There's NOTHING about that in the instructions! They just say to mount that bracket below the antenna. That's it.

Reply to
J.G.

Thanks. It's original and has worked great for the last 30 odd years. The teflon tape cold flows into all the cracks and joints. It prevents capillary action. Best of all, when removed, the original connectors are as shiny as when they were new. I use 1" wide plumbers tape. BC Hardware used to stock it, but they haven't had it for years. Common 1/2" is available anywhere and will suffice.

Hmmm... I just found some on eBay. Time to restock:

No. Not the bolts. Stainless doesn't need any protection. Don't even bother greasing the nuts as a slipper nut tends to loosen if the dish vibrates in the wind.

The teflon plus electrical tape wrap is for electrical and RF connectors. Most of those are internally protected inside the Rocket housing. The four rubber boots over the four RF connectors is probably adequate. However, I like to wrap the connector with teflon tape, and then slide on the boot. The boot will deteriorate after about 5 years in the sun. After it crumbles and falls apart, just rewrap the teflon, layer the electrical tape, and spray on the acrylic (mask the radio) and you're good for another 10 years or so.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Doing the math. 40ft up to the eaves. My guess is about 40ft over the roof plus 20ft to the ground and around a tree. Total is 100ft. This is going to be close.

Been there, done it that way. Worked just fine. However, you're going to destroy the tiles on the roof peak if you fall. That's fine because they're easy to replace. Your life is worth more than the tiles.

Easy. Pretend the cheap Made in China ladder just buckled in the middle and you're hanging a few feet below the roof eave. You're tied in with your hardness so you're not going to fall any further. How are you going to get down? You can't have an assistant untie the other end of the rope because they're unlikely to lower you safely without belaying. If you have climbing experience and know how to handle the ropes and hardware, lowering yourself is no problem. For everyone else, a stop descender will be much easier.

You need the ladder, which should also be tied to a rope thrown over the roof peak and tied to a tree with a separate line. It doesn't need to be 11mm. Just enough to keep the ladder from sliding sideways. The safety rope is just in case something goes wrong.

I can tell you've never done this before. I suggest you find someone with experience to do the install. (Not me. I'm getting too old for this stuff). Also, if you move the project to the roof peak, you can climb up the other side of the house, which presumably is closer to the ground.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Don't know what your Verzon coverage is like, but they've been rolling out LTE across the country. Once that is in place, Fusion is a viable alternative to satellite. Speed's about the same and you still have to deal with caps, but pricing is less and the latency is much lower.

Reply to
Robert Neville

For these remote data sites, satellite internet is probably good enough. They probably only upload when enough shaking occurs. The ones I found turn out to get moved, which seems odd to me unless they set them up and perhaps set off a charge to see it ping.

There is a band just above Ku I thought. 18GGZ or so?

Reply to
miso

If you have real estate, I would try to mount the sat dish on a pole in the ground. Yeah I know, you mountain folk have trees to contend with.

BTW, there are people in Castro Valley that use satellite internet. The east bay has it's share of hillbillies, but most of the trees are long gone due to being used in construction, clear cutting for ranching, etc.

Over at Mono Lake, they put up a gazebo at an historical mill site. I've seen the historical marker many times, but the gazebo was new (or newish). Anyway, it turns out the wood for Bodie came from around Mono Lake, which explains a lot of the clear cutting.

When you head further east into either the East Sierras or Nevada, wood was a real premium. Ah, but there was no shortage of stone. ;-)

Reply to
miso

I noticed that 3G areas are quickly being converted to 4G. It's still unstable in many areas (reverting to 3G, or nothing) but it's certainly a move in the right direction. Do they make a 4G access point for an entire house, either 4G to WiFi or wired? Something that could have an antenna optimally placed? It gets expensive if every device needs its own service and often data service inside a house is spotty.

Reply to
krw

They setup a ground station with satellite first. If it looks like it's usable, they order a lease line, or install a 400MHz uplink.

Nice 5.3 shaker a few minutes ago:

Yep. There's K band above Ku band.

Roughly starting on Pg 50. Nothing suitable for satellite internet until you get to Ka band.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

If you recall the old war driving days, i.e. when wifi was actually work to find, there were tools to log "hits" geographically. I had fired the software up about a year ago for yucks. Amazing the number of WISPs out there. I used a dual band dongle. I found maybe one 5.8GHz WAP.

Reply to
miso

Yes - look here:

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Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the concept drawing.

Reply to
Robert Neville

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