Before I went on the roof I wanted to test all the cable connections indoors. Remember, in one of the earlier pics I had a cantanna shooting through my wall to stumble an AP several houses away. Notice that the Grid is in the same direction, just blasting through the sheet rock. It was getting a little crowded in here and I had to make sure I was not too close to the antenna, especially when testing with the amp. Ouch!!!

I then proceeded to test several mast heights. I first mounted the antenna rotor to the lower mast connected to the chimney. Then I would mount a 5' section of mast one at a time to determine the bend, wind and height gauge. I only have a 4" section of the mast that is secured at the top of the rotor so 4" to 10' was not very good in terms of stability - obviously. This pic shows two sections of 5' mast connected together. Notice the tilt already. Four inches will never support that. Nice height though. The antenna cables will run through the skylight as a temporary access into the lab.

Here is another shot of the height but the support will never do. Too bad. See the rotor mounted securely on the side of the chimney to avoid any wind load.

One more shot.

Here is a shot using a cut 7' section from the original 10' mast from the old TV antenna that was here. I used a 7' section and a 5' section. It was just too high and weak. I put a little US flag up there and went around the neighborhood to see if I can see the flag for LOS. I was able to see the flag over a half mile away.

Here is a better shot of my mast testing. This was with the 2 - 5' mast sections and one 4' section all attached together. Great height but too dangerous to implement, I was dreaming. I could have used guy wires but I would have lost the 360 rotation ability.

I then just tried with a 5' section from the rotor and ran a proof of concept test with the rotor and running Netstumbler on my ThinkPad on the roof. I picked up several APs immediately. I wanted the antenna to be roof height and with the short beamwidth I wanted to just nail all the roofs evenly in the neighborhood. If I went too high I would miss homes, too low, I would have too much Fresnel zone interference. All antennas are vertically polarized.

This is a shot of the same test but you can see all the tools, cabling and extra mast pieces I was working with.

If only I had a TOWER!!!!!!