All Forums  Catalina/Capri 25/250 Sailor's Forums  Catalina 25 Specific Forum  Installing a mast VHF Antenna

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Screensize: 640 x 480 800 x 600 1024 x 768 1280 x 1024 UserName: Password: Format Mode: Basic  Help  Prompt  Format: Font Andale Mono Arial Arial Black Book Antiqua Century Gothic Comic Sans MS Courier New Georgia Impact Lucida Console Script MT Bold Stencil Tahoma Times New Roman Trebuchet MS Verdana   Size 1 2 3 4 5 6   Color Black Red Yellow Pink Green Orange Purple Blue Beige Brown Teal Navy Maroon LimeGreen Message: * HTML is OFF * Forum Code is ON Smilies [quote][i]Originally posted by Lee Panza[/i] [br]One of the big factors favoring a Catalina 25 is the ease of dropping the mast for maintenance. There's plenty of info about it on this forum, and I'd encourage you to look into it (BTW, just in case it's not entirely clear, the boom needs to be detached from the mast before the mast comes down). Snaking a new cable into the mast is relatively easy using a "fish-tape" (every electrician has at least one, but if you might ever need to run a new wire through your boat for ANYTHING you'll find this a valuable tool to acquire). VHF propagates pretty much on a line-of-sight basis, so the higher the antenna is the farther it can transmit/receive over a body of water large enough to extend past the visible horizon. Sailboat masts move around a lot, so a 3db antenna is usually preferred. This transmits in a pattern with a broad vertical dimension, compared with higher db antennas that transmit in flatter radial bands. A typical antenna for a sailboat mast will be only a little more than 3' long. Some of us consider the Metz Manta to be the "gold standard" for a small sailboat antenna, but Shakespeare offers alternatives. The most common connectors for the coax cable are PL-259's, and it's easy to buy cable with those fittings on both ends (the male fittings will usually mate to the radio and to the antenna base). HOWEVER... you'll want to snake the cable through holes in the side of the mast, as well as through a minimal hole through the cabin top, and you'll probably want a male/female connector pair between the mast and the cabin top penetration to allow the mast to be removed easily, so you'll be better off with bare cable and separate fittings you add to it yourself. RG-58 cable is cheap and easy to run, although RG-8X provides less loss. RG-8/U or even LMR-400 provide far less loss, but at almost 1/2" diameter they are a bit more difficult to run. Probably the most valuable advice would be to apply liberal quantities of dielectric grease in the connectors exposed to the weather (despite the name, dielectric grease is NON-conductive, so it simply excludes water from getting inside). That's the basics. A hand-held is good for boat-to-boat communication, and for relatively short-distance ship-to-shore, but a good masthead antenna extends your reach and expands the potential recipients if you ever need to call for help. If you know that you'll never be distant from a prospective recipient, a hand-held is good enough. But a good mast-head installation, with a good cable to a fixed radio unit, adds a substantial measure of reliability if you ever need to call for help and nobody's nearby. [br] [/quote]   Check here to include your profile signature. Check here to subscribe to this topic.