I’m in a villa and outdoor antennas are prohibited.
In addition my unit is surrounded by oak trees everywhere except west over the Gulf of Mexico. That said, my wife keeps my stuff (6 computers, 2 routers, 2 printers & 6 hours of battery backup) confined to my comm closet and the attic.
That happened to me when we downsized homes. Gone is my dedicated office with attached comm room full of equipment and its own AC. Now I’m a beggar looking for space. It is a good thing that electronics have also downsized. My mainframe used to take up a stall in the garage. Now it is tiny by comparison. It fits in one 24" rack instead of eight 24" racks.
My wife is spinning, knitting and weaving.
She has her own dedicated room to leave the stuff she is working with there.
Sometimes i say: “How do you find things in this chaos?”
I have a single Raspi, a USB stick connected via 2 Meter USB and an Antenna with 2 Meter Coax
And she always say “I have an output with my chaos, you have not”
At this point the discussion about where to mount the antenna stops immediately.
My better half is really good for this sort of thing. She’ll tut a bit but I aways seem to get away with it
Anyway, some comparisons. Heatmap and altitude plots from before and after. It really is a big difference and having had the aerial that high, I’m very keen to get it back there.
I beg to differ. My wife has no problems whatsoever with my technical madness at home.
She has her own interests that take up a lot of space so we just bought a large house to have room for all of it.
I guesstimate that we have approx 120 square meters occupied by technical stuff, books, musical instruments (5 guitars, 1 bass, 2 drum kits, amps, mixers, microphones, etc), various tools, hunting equipment, reloading equipment and what not.
In there somewhere there are also two teenagers mostly playing with the instruments and using the computers.
I guess that I picked a winner in the wife lottery (25 years and couting)
I was lucky, my wife told me that I could do what I wanted, provided that no cable is visible in the house !
So I put the antenna on the roof, and the cables are in the garage
some days ago i’ve seen an Antenna hidden by the frosted glass cover of a stand lamp.
Maybe adding some LED strips to the antenna for having ambient light.
Then it’s a stylish deco for the living room and no wife would ever complain
My new aerial is due here tomorrow so I’ve just ordered 10m of Hyperflex 10 and a couple of N-types. I think I’ll only need 4-5m but I’ve been caught out with short lengths before.
Then I just need to wait for the weather. The forecast for the weekend is winds up to around 20mph and I won’t lower the mast when it’s like that. Hopefully that’s wrong and it’ll be a bit calmer.
If anyone is interested how one installs an aerial like the hexbeam, you can have a quick read of my blog post here.