Has anyone ever painted a Jampro 1 bay antenna to match the structure it is attached to? If so what kind of paint? I was thinking an oil based spray paint. Trying not to attract the attention of NIMBYS.
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Camouflaging antenna
- Thread starter secondchoice
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Found elsewhere: '' 'Cold galvanizing' zinc-rich paint,'' but the reference clearly didn't state whether this was tower/hardware or antenna element coating.
Antenna construction is marine brass and copper. Paint does not adhere well to brass or copper and tends to flake off. The only way to get paint to stick would be to rough up the surface sufficiently for the paint to adhere to the material.
Antenna construction is marine brass and copper. Paint does not adhere well to brass or copper and tends to flake off. The only way to get paint to stick would be to rough up the surface sufficiently for the paint to adhere to the material.
I painted a 4 bay Jampro with CRC Urethane Seal Coat to act as a spray-on raydome experiment. The antenna would detune if wet snow or ice built up. The coating worked great, but needed to be re-applied about every two years. The difference in your example is; the CRC Seal Coat was approved as a UV resistant electrical coating. Colored spray paint likely has metallic compounds used in the color, so it could detune the antenna.
You just answered the question I was about to ask of Scott: Why would you want to paint an antenna?
I had a case where one of my sites would go from just below freezing to as high as 80° (F) every day of the year. Even tower painting did not like the constant 50° excursions every day.
An engineer locally from Phillips asked me, "how would food taste after a year if you froze it, thawed it and then re-froze it every day?" His point is that the ongoing stress weakened the paint and eventually it both failed to protect and could have minute fractures that let moisture in.
You may ask why we thought about painting the elements. This was the first FM in the country and the government official who had to give a permit on national parkland wanted "everything" painted. We ended up not painting under the assumption that the bureaucrat would likely not leave his desk, let along go up a single lane dirt and gravel trail going up to around 13,000 feet AMSL with about 8 320° foldbacks.
In my example, it was a new Class A CP from scratch and I really didn't want to bother with antenna heaters that are prone to failure. The Jampro 'arrowhead' antennas are great performers, but don't like wet snow or icing buildup. The arrowhead version with full raydomes needed to be much beefier mechanically to support the wind loading of plastic raydomes which doubled the purchase price. The first winter I'd get remote control calls in the middle of the night where the transmitter was folding back power due to ice. In the spring when things thawed out, I scaled the tower with a bucket full of CRC Urethane Sealant spraycans and proceded to spray the crap out of the individual bays, applying a second coat after the first dried. The following winter had no reflected power, even with a lot of really wet snow followed by ice. The spraydomes lasted about two years before requiring a respray.
I love the term "spraydomes".
With so many of today's "engineers" capable of inserting M.2 SSDs and about nothing else, I wonder if all of this is a lost art. Your procedure to avoid radomes is fantastic, and has the advantage of not increasing the windload. Would anyone today even think about that and consider the conductive characteristics of any paint or spray that might be considered?
Remember the Cleveland Institute electronic slide rule we used before the HP-35 came out? There are some techs today I'd like to hit with one of those!
I still have two actual slide rules that I plan on passing to my kids. One was my dad's, who showed me how to use it despite the dawn of pocket calculators and PC workstations in the day. The other slide rule was from my dad's friend, Kelly Johnson, who ran the Lockheed Skunkworks development team during the design of 'Project Oxcart' which was the famous YF-12A later becoming the SR-71A Blackbird.
I took my first of many Cleveland Institute courses in 1963, so was quite a few years ahead of computers and workstations. I can recall flying to Miami from Ecuador and driving to the HP office in Fort Lauderdale in 1972 to buy the first high level HP calculator... which was over $300! And that was my introduction to RPL, too.
Reverse Polish notation (RPN)?
I remember my first good (expensive) calculator was a Texas Instruments TI-2500 'Datamath'. A lot of my friends later in college were using HP calculators with RPN, but switching between regular entry and RPN was too frustrating for me. It wasn't until the 90's I bought one of the TI-92 series calculators with graphing capabilities.
Reverse Polish Logic was how it was called then.
That was a whole two decades after the first HP calculator. That event is not often mentioned, but is a significant step in moving technology to the desktop (or transmitter site).
Cold Coffee
Banned
What kind of radio station would want to hide their antenna?
The kind with towers that are subject to NIMBY harassment.
In Tucson AZ, there is a mountain-top site which has several towers (all 200' or less) painted eggshell blue, because local jurisdictions made it a condition for getting building permits. I don't recall if the actual antennas were painted, but they may have been.
The buildings at the site were all painted earth-brown colors, again as a permitting condition. The intent was to keep residents in the expensive houses nearby from having their mountain views spoiled by ugly towers.
There was a female homeowner at the base of the mountain who was known to keep an eagle eye on the site, and would report anything that looked like a violation of the permit agreements. One of the engineers who worked at the site shortly after it was built told me a story about accidently leaving the outside floodlights turned after an overnight work session, and waking up later that day to a pile of angry messages.
The first answer would be NIMBY complaints or to prevent them
Cold Coffee
Banned
Glad we don't have this enlightened progressive NIMBY here! Their underwear must be too tight!
From a compiler’s point of view, RPN is easy to parse. From the perspective of data structures, everything can be done on.a stack. But it seems counterintuitive at first and shifting between RPN and standard algebraic notation takes some getting used to.
I was exposed to calculators well before being exposed to computer languages, so the advantages of RPN didn’t become apparent to me until later on. There’s also a “forward” notation but I don’t know that anyone has done much with it.
Cold Coffee
Banned
I never painted my ERI Antennas, ever! It just seemed like a strange thing to do. I hope it works for them.
The only thing worse than a NIMBY is a CAVE person. Citizens Against Virtually Everything. My Dad had to deal with them to get permission to start the City of Blue Ridge's procurement of CSX property for the Blue Ridge Scenic Railway. The CAVE people were against putting new play ground equipment in the city park too. "More kids will make too much noise".
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