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Tying an antenna is an important part of using the antenna. If you have a wire antenna, whether a roll up dipole or a random wire antenna or some other type of wire antenna you will want to get the antenna off the ground. How you mount it will influence how it operates, as well as how safe it is to use the antenna.

Safety

Antennas can generate a couple hundred volts at the tips, they can get warm and if they come in contact with people cause burns, if they come in contact with dry leaves or grass they can start fires. It is important that if you use more than a couple watts of transmit power you should properly connect the antenna through some insulator that can handle the heat.

Materials Selection

When using rope you should select a good rope that is UV resistant and weather resistant. UV resistant rope is going to be some polyster like dacron. This can also provide an excellent size:load ratio, where a 3/16 inch rope can hold 200 pounds of weight. These will generally last for years even with rain and sun beating down on them.

Avoid cotton ropes and other ropes that will break down easily in sunlight or rot if they get wet. When the zombies attack you do not want to have to go outside to restring your antenna because the rope snapped.

Ropes that have a metal center are also a potential hazard, the center core is conductive, and may affect your antenna’s performance, but they also can carry current down to whatever they are attached to.

SWR

If you do not tie your antenna tight, it can whip around in the wind. This can cause your SWR to fluctuate on transmit and may make reception a bit more difficult. Some common methods of mitigating the wind effect is to tie small fishing weights to the bottom part of the antenna to prevent it from flipping over. Take care that the antenna is not tied so tight that it will stretch or snap.

Dogbones

One method is to use a “dogbone” insulator. These are often about $1 including shipping from mail order supply stores, made of plastic or ceramic, and provide an excellent way to tie an antenna to some other structure or to a tree. You can make similar connectors out of wood, pvc pipe, or other materials. The important thing is that it is not conductive and will not get burnt if you apply high power loads to the antenna. Plastic can melt, wood can burn, so ceramic connectors are generally safest.

When tying the antenna, tie the rope with a good knot that will not come undone to one end. The other end, loop the wire through and twist back onto itself. It is desirable to solder the wrapped wire so that it does not come undone.

Tying to a tree

When tying an antenna between two trees, or a tree and a fixed structure, you may find that when the wind blows the trees move, and this will cause stress to the antenna potentially snapping it. In order to relieve some of the stress a pully and counterweight will be required. This is a simple system and can be improvised with 2 dogbone connectors or some other way that lets the rope slide.

To improvise it with 2 dogbone insulators, you would replace the pulley in the image with a dogbone connector, or anything else that has a smooth surface. Since you do not have a rotating pulley wheel, you will want to ensure that the surface is really smooth to reduce wear on the rope.

You can use any weighted object for a counterweight, a brick, lead fishing weights, a zombies head, whatever has a suitable mass that will not break your antenna but will cause it to stay taught while the wind blows the trees. Empty plastic soda bottles filled with sand or pebbles work well since you can punch holes in them to tie the rope.

Small pulleys can be obtained from hardware stores or from pet shops, usually for tying dogs up but allowing them to run around in the yard. An important note is that you do not want the antenna to go into the pulley, you only want the rope to go into the pulley.

Tie one end of the antenna as normal, using an insulator as described above. Tie the other end of the antenna to an insulator so that you can attach the rope. That end goes through a pulley mounted tightly to a tree or structure. If you tie the pulley loosely to a tree or structure, it will sag down, at about a 45 degree angle from where it is tied, this can cause it to flip around and the rope get jammed and you will lose your protection from wind.