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| A loose spider arm not seated in bracket. |
We are expecting some high winds and lots of rain starting late afternoon and all evening and for this reason, I took my Hustler 4BTV antenna down. The maximum gusts are to be in around 70-80 km and the antenna specs say the antenna is suitable for 90 km winds. I would rather not go with the see what happens theory as I have made the antenna very easy to take down. I decided not to purchase the tilt base for the antenna as there is nowhere I can tilt the antenna fully down too.
I can store the antenna in the shed and it only takes about 10 minutes for the whole ordeal of taking it down and storing it. While the antenna was down today I noticed a few of the blade spiders were loose. There are 6 of these what is called in the manual "spider blades". It's for the 40m portion of the antenna. They are pieces of round hollow aluminum tubing held in place by nuts and bolts. Two of the 6 blades were very loose. I don't think the nuts loosened off I think the aluminum tubing being a soft material compressed a bit and the connection came loose. I tightened the nut and bolts on all the spider blades and will check it each time the antenna comes down. I don't feel double nutting each connection would solve the issue as was said it's my humble opinion the nuts did not loosen off.
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| Top view of securing screw. |
My theory is at one point the aluminum blades will stop compressing and the connection will remain tight. I would have thought an SWR issue would have been apparent with this but nothing was out of sorts with the SWR.
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| Nuts on bottom of spider arm. |
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