[amsat-bb] Regular Arrow vs. Alaskan Arrow

[J. Boyd]

On 2016年01月10日 04:10, Dave Swanson wrote:
> Third, as mentioned many times by others, the AKA is big and heavy. As 
> Jeff, NI3B, said a while back in a post "Holding one of those things 
> up in the air for fourteen minutes and your arms will look like Popeye 
> the Sailor Man at LOS." Combine this with my distaste for tripods, and 
> you can see where we've got an issue.
Well, actually after that I indeed did get a tripod. (Some of us are 
mere desk workers and do not have the advantage of buffing ourselves up 
via splitting wood, so I had to find some other way to keep the antenna 
aimed accurately.)

What I ended up doing was, I homebrewed a mount out of some PVC pipe 
joints and a 1/4" bolt that fits the tripod shoe. The PVC pipe was just 
large enough to fit over the boom and still allow for lateral movement, 
so I can still adjust polarization while it's mounted.

http://i.imgur.com/gu3L3yC.jpg

With the Arrow so mounted, I can still adjust roll (up to 90°, which is 
enough), pitch, and yaw without feeling like my right arm is on fire 
when the pass is over. At the moment I'm still using my camera tripod 
with ball mount (which probably cost more than all my sat gear combined, 
ugh) but this weekend I'm going to get a dedicated az/el tripod which is 
lighter and easier to set up in the field.

Using this setup, I hope to one day achieve my Holy Grail of sat 
operation: using the Alaskan Arrow to complete a QSO via FO-29 with 
actual Alaska.

73
-- 
J. Boyd, JR2TTS/NI3B
the2belo at arrl.net
www.qrz.com/db/jr2tts