Digging to China

Lowes

A trip to Lowes found 10 foot water pipe, two inches in diameter. I had the store slice one section in half, and bought another full section and a coupler. That should work. A five foot section tp plant in the ground, and a 15 foot section to lift up for the antenna to mount to.

Boy, these things are heavy.

Digging Tools

All we had for digging were some gardening tools. Hardly up to the job. So, I bought a skinny shovel that looked like it should do to dig a small hole. (I really did not think this through completely. If I need a three foot deep hole, about a foot across, that shovel is not really going to work.)

But, I started the "Big Dig" anyway.

And got all of six inched down.

Rocks

It turns out that six inches below the surface of the Earth (at least in Texas), the ground becomes rock. Not solid, Michelangelo-can-carve-a-statue-out-of-it rock. More like the crumbly 2 to 9 inch across rock. There is hardly any dirt in that stuff at all.

I used a tin can to scoop out the material as I tried to push past that rock layer, and got no where.

This is not going to be fun!

Back to Lowes

I was hoping that this rock layer would be shallow, so I bought a steel spike and a five-pound sledge hammer, thinking I could convince the rock to get out of the way for my small hole. The spike has a pointed end, and the sledge did convince a fee chunks of rock to give up the fight.

I got two more inches down!

Sweating like gang-busters, I sat back and thought some more about this adventure.

Post Hole Digger

It was obvious that I was going to need something other than my hands to get this stuff out of the hole. The shovel was no good for that. So, I talked to a friend who had one of those real old fashooned post-hole diggers, and borrowed that.

The only problem with this tool is that is does nothing when the hole is full of rocks. You have to break up the rocks and use the digger to pull them out of the hole.

Two more inches!

Electric Hammer

My post-hole digger driend is a retired contractor. He had a bunch of interesting tools left over from his old profession, and he brought out an electric hammer. This is used in demolition, and works like a baby jack hammer. The only problem with thsi thing was the handles. They were too big to get very far doen into the hole. Still, we worked with that thing all afternoon one day, and manages to pound our way about noine more inches down.

Sheesh, this digging to China stuff will take FOREVER!

More Lowes Tools

Back at Lowes, I found a six foot steel spike with a chisel blade on one end, and a wide cap on the other. This thing is designed to break up concrete, using a sledge hammer. At six feet, surely it will be long enough to get to my required three foot depth!

The rocks had other ideas, though. Even pounding on that spike was not enough to get all of the rocks to break up. But I did manage to get to my required 36 inches deep. The hole was about a foot across at the top, but more like 9 inches across at the bottom. I thought I saw a cooley hat in the bottom of that hole, but that might have been my imagination, or a sweat filled eye playing tricks on me.

When I quit digging, the hole as deep enough I could not reach the bottom of the thing. That post-hole digger was essential for cleaning out the last bit of rock from the hole.

Pea Gravel

With the hole at the required depth, and the rocks cleared out from the area, it was time to plant the ground pipe. I had two choices here. One was to mix up a bunch of concrete and fill the hole with that. This would work, but if you even needed to get that thing out of the ground, it would be a lot of work. Another idea was to use pea-gravel, which is small rocks, hardly more than a quarter inch across.

This approach seems silly, but it works. The gravel rock fills the hole very nicely, and as the pipe giggles around in the wind, it actually gets stronger as the gravel settles in. It took five bags of the stuff to fill in my three foot hole!

Here is the final lower pipe installation:

Mount Hardware

With the ground pipe in place, it was time to assemble the "tip-over" hardware. This kit came with all the nuts and bolts needed to do the job, and went together pretty quickly.

I bolted the assembly to the ground pipe, then attached the two part upper pipe section to it in about an hour. The upper pipe was a bit of a hassle, since I had to assemble it with a coupler in the middle. I bought two end caps to cover the top of the ground pipe, and the top of the upper pipe, and hoisted the entire thing up!

It clears the top of my shack by about three feet. That is probably enough for the antenna, but I need to assemble that thing, all 10,000 parts of it, to be sure.

Project Done

The mounting pipe project is done!. It took far longer than expected, but I learned a thing or two in the process. My next project is the antenna itself, which will take a bit of time, because it is pretty complex. For now, I get to admire a fifteen foot tall water pipe, standing behind my shack!

Silly, but building antennas is part of being an Amateur Radio Operator. Everything is waiting for that antenna, then I can talk to the world from my back yard.

My students are going "Who Cares? You can email them just as easily, and you do not ned all that radio stuff."

Yeah, but try that after a hurricane wipes out your Internet! Ham Radio has been doing public service in emergencies like that for over a century!

There is a lot of interesting technology out there to learn about. Radio has fascinated me forever, it seems. I am now qualified to explore the radio waves over quite a range of frequencies, and there is a lot of interesting things going on it that spectrum of electromagnetic energy!