[Music] just sort of give you a couple of tips and tricks of how to uh to build a signature
nine in case you are unaware it's a nine meter pole it's got six elements on it it does 40.
to 10 naturally without an ATU and with an 80 you can do the whole of six it might actually
tune on uh two meters as well depending on how the 40 meter the 30 meter and the 17 meter
element is tuned but very often you'll find that you'll get better than 1.5 uh on two
meters all right for kind of walkie-talkie or local repeaters but obviously not for
long distance so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take it off the pole because I
think you've seen me build it I'm just going to run through some tips and tricks along the
build I'm loving the fact that I can just undo this so239 here and pull the tube up
so I've left the screw thread off in fact in fact I've left it under there by accident
but I can't be bothered to undo these to take it back out but I'd remove that all together
put your ground plate on the ground over the pole Gene you don't walk all over the
radials mate uh obviously I've Vaseline my connector here so239 is ready ground plate
in right back to this bit so I would leave that off and leave it in your Workshop to be honest
then we've got the The Driven plate now I have used an HCL clamp here which is fine
but I've supplied in the kit an HCL clamp and the standard stainless hose clamp along with a
bit of tubing as well like the old style like uh here let's go across here and I'll show you
like this this is this this is the signature 12.4 blooming aircraft going over up setting my audio
that's actually got black tubing I should probably clear I've made my elements according to the cut
chart I've put the cut chart underneath this video in description it's also in a user guide you saw
in the last video me putting these four connectors on here but let's ignore the elements for a minute
so to build this one would get all the plates and push them down on the pre-production versions
as you can see these are a wee bit tight here so Tyler is going to make the drawings
a whisker bigger a couple of thousandths of an inch and then they will fit down much closer to
this HCL easy clamp here so these are hex clamps they're permanent they'll last you effectively
as long as the pole is you could glue this by the way in the meantime for the pre-production people
I would take that out either kind of 3 8 of an inch well seven between seven millimeter and
nine millimeter maybe up to ten millimeter because you'll see in a minute as we go up the pole you'll
need a tiny bit bigger hole I did originally build this without a bigger hole it's just a bit of a
nightmare so there's four plates one here there's one here as well and to get these get these uh all
the way down up I'll make an official build video for this one day I had to rotate the plate to sort
of gradually come down so this is the second plate up and I'm about four inches 100 millimeters or so
up from that HCL clamp here so I fit all the plates that's number two uh here's number three
and here's number four as well okay I fit all all these and then I go back down and I fit the
the clamps be quite aggressive when you cut the tails off you don't have to faff about don't for
whatever you do fit these with the big long tails it'll take you forever make a rough guesstimate
cut it short shove it in eight mil spanner I used a box spanner here just to close that off you can
be quite aggressive with the tight tight fit here all right so now let's just go up and down these
elements here I'm going to start with 10 and end up at 40 all right now I color code my elements
Richard of York gained battle in vain which means red orange yellow green blue indigo violet
but I've I've got brown and a few other guys but anyway red I know is always 10 meters and this
is very simple we go up about 60 centimeters or so from the from the second plate so we've
come through the stabilizing plate down here we cut it it's a six millimeter six mil fold
back six centimeter fold back here and there's a little knot little stopper knot how to make
a stopper knot is in the user guide very very simple going that's a six centimeter fold over
I'm going to talk about foldovers in a minute 12 meters is nearly identical it should be opposite
10 and here it is further up the pole so I'm now approximately 30 odd centimeters one foot
from the second spreader here 70 meters is roughly halfway between the second and a third spreader so
they're 17 20 is about nine ten inches about 180 200 millimeters from the top again with a stopper
knot I'm going to talk about this 20 meter fold back in a minute it's quite substantial
all the way up to the top spreader now so 40 comes up to a little intermediate tensioning
stop a knot thing okay A little bit of looseness here through here so the pole bends you see this
is quite happy it flicks around all the way to the top of the pole nearly where junior is
all the way back down and this is how we tune it I'm coming back down here approximately one foot
or 30 centimeters I would say well I'll put it in the user guide but basically going from
from here down to here was I can't remember about 100 kilohertz right a couple more tensioning Loops
I'm just going to talk about I'm going to talk about a trick right at the very top spreader here
it is possible if you really wanted to you could tune 15 independently at 40. what we can do and I
tried it I came I actually tested 30 little micro turns here and that can drop 21 megahertz down to
19 megahertz so if you extrapolate that out and you find that 15 meters is a wee bit High two or
three turns here will drop 15 down a whisker and almost leave 40 where it is two important
notes for you I'm coming up here and this is the second spreader so this is rough roughly
halfway between the bottom and the top spreader an ideal place to put an intermediate tension point
for 30. and 40. ideal so this just keeps this 40 meter and 30 meter as everything bends in the Wind
nice and tensioned up so that's really really nice I might recommend that actually on the
classic as well that's on the second spreader okay so we look down at the top of the second spreader
apart from the fact I've got Bird poo on it we can see we've got 12 and 10 coming up here
we also got 30 and 40. I want to talk about these foldovers because
I've lost count how many DX commanders I've built in this field
and let me just wait for this aircraft to go over I can't see
it because of the cloud cover now I might make a video about this because
let me start from the beginning originally when I prototyped this signature nine I put it on
this base here which is effectively the 12.4 base and I'll just put a fiberglass tube in
and padded it out so I could you know just easily tilt the signature up and down so I was using the
12.4 signature radial field which is substantial three to four hundred meters over a thousand feet
of radials buried most of this no most of this field however I wanted to build it like a customer
would we put the post in not so long ago and I've put a miniature radial field in here and that
radial field is just 100 meters of wire and what happened is is that the tune went from let's say
7.1 best to 7.4 now I found that very interesting because I thought well was it defense getting
in the way or was it the fact that I've got not quite as good as radial field I have on this one
now by the way that is not a lot when you get to 10 meters there's maybe a hundred kilohertz
difference on the 20 meter band it was about 150 200 kilohertz difference so it's not a lot
but where I'm getting to with this is that I'm starting to think I'm changing my mind
on a few things I'm starting to think is it actually better to build these slightly longer
on the fold over because if we if you build a DX Commander with I don't know a one inch less length
but give it a five inches on a fold over you can then just trim the fold back to get your
perfect resonance rather than adjusting the whole length of the antenna because as you can see on
20 meters I've got quite a substantial fold back here it makes no impact really on the quality of
the signal you heard me probably on uh 20 meters last Friday it's fine it's only been only just
top loading the very top of the element this is just for the sort of final bit of the tune
so I I'm going to write this up in a user guide when I've thought about it a bit
more clearly I may recommend in future that you build your DX Commander with a slightly
long fold back and just cut the fold back and get the perfect tune all right you've got to
remember that there I happen to know is uh six centimeters so it's 20 so it's about two inches
that's about two inches there all right if I extended this element two inches this way of the
tune is going to change because adding two inches here is not the same as adding two inches here if
I really wanted to add two inches here I could add triple that I could add six inches down this way
so two inches that way is the same as about six inches this way which is about 100 millimeters
so I might may recommend as a sort of discussion topic what you could do is just make your fold
backs a little bit longer and make life a little bit easier on the final tune just by cutting your
fold back back so there's an eye you can see look I've made joins all over this as I've been tuning
it I join all my wire all the time that's just insulation tape by the way you I could undo this
slip some um what I call it glue line heat shrink there that'd be fine forever frankly
you couldn't get much more efficient and simple than that some people worried about this rotating
I really wouldn't worry about it it's not going to go very far anyway I think this is going to
be a cracky antenna it costs a lot more I'm sorry you still buy the classic so you save
yourself you know well over 100 bucks actually it's lighter to ship costs less money that way
Pole's less expensive plates are less expensive everything's less expensive but anyways cracking
little antenna I think it'll sell very well I think you'll enjoy it as well I'll put another
video up here for you and I've got a binge watch playlist some of this stuff you might not have
watched before so have a look at it see what you think all right hey all the best now bye-bye