For quite a bit of my early POTA career I was a wire guy. I carried mainly EFHWs cut for 40m or 20m and I got pretty good at tossing a line into a tree, sometimes surprising myself with my flashes of accuracy and loft — and also hanging my head when yet another arborist weight went sailing into a nearby creek or became a permanent piece of fruit swinging gently from a branch 25′ up in a in a tall tree.
I like wire because I can cut it resonant and then just plug it into my rig without having to deal with a tuner. For most of my wire days I was carrying an IC-705, which doesn’t have an internal tuner, so it was either resonant antennas or throw yet another piece of gear into an already heavy pack.
What changed was the introduction of a KX2 to the mix. It has an internal antenna tuner that’ll match just about anything, and it meant I wasn’t tied to just resonant antennas any more. I started to play around with verticals, at first just a wire suspended from a branch, since I’m pretty good at dropping a line wherever it needs to be. I’d hang the wire vertically from a line and then run a sloping counterpoise and let the KX2 match it.
This wasn’t a terrible solution, and it’s pretty lightweight, but it wasn’t long before I started looking around for ‘real’ vertical.
First up was an Elecraft AX-1, since I had the KX-2. It’s a very small multiband loaded vertical, and I used it with a small camera tripod per Elecraft’s suggestion (photo via Elecraft).
The Elecraft AX-1.
It isn’t a bad antenna, and man, is it light, but I was taking it into conditions that it just wan’t able to handle. The threads used for screwing the bits together are incredibly fine, and grit and debris get in there almost immediately. Twice the whip got jammed in the coil, and I was able to get it undone back home, but the third time it was so badly stuck that I harvested the coil and threw the rest in the trash.
Next up was Gabil’s GRA-ULT01 multiband vertical, which is much more robust. It is quite a bit larger than the AX-1, but it works really well on 10m to 40m, and there’s an 80m accessory coil if you want to give that a try. I’ll write a separate review of the GRA-ULT01, it deserves it.
What I carry most of the time now is a REZ Antenna Systems [Z]-17, a 17-foot collapsible whip with a 3/8×24 base. I’m nearly always doing a Rock-n-Roll activation where I’m stopping for 20 minutes in the middle of a much longer hike, so I usually just call CQ on 20m and that’s it. The REZ gets out great on 20m and I don’t need to fiddle with coils and the like, just screw it into the tripod, set the radials, and off to the races.
That’s a long introduction to a tripod! The GRA-ULT01 comes with two mounts, one with a 3/8×24 thread and one with an SO-239 UHF socket. This covers most of the commercial portable verticals that you’ll find on the market. Both mounts terminate in an SO-239 UHF connector.
The tripod is crazy versatile. It has four different length detents and multiple angles for each leg, so you can set it up on just about any surface, uneven or not. I tend to extend the legs out as far as they go to get a wide, low base. The feet are used to loosen and tighten each leg. A feature that delights me is that if I want to extend a leg by two lengths, I can just turn the foot two ‘clicks’ and pull. It comes right out to two.
Multiple lengths and angles adapt to any surface.
Here’s a look at the REZ 17′ vertical mounted to the GRA-ULT01 from two different activations. The closeup shows how I attach the radials directly to the shield of the coax.
The tripod’s only flaw is the grounding system — easier to attach directly to the shield.
This brings us to the unit’s one design miss. There are three tiny (and I mean TINY) machined screws with even tinier integrated spring-loaded studs that are supposed to be used to attach a ground or radial lead. I don’t even know where mine are, I might have thrown them away at some point, or more likely flung them into a creek or simply dropped one and couldn’t find it on site. If I had enough time I might be able to come up with a worse solution.
Instead I just use a clamp to chomp down on the coax shield. Electrically it is the same, and practically it is a LOT simpler to deal with than those silly spring-loaded bolts are.
I use shaving-kit bags to pack my gear in, and one bag holds the tripod, extra adapter, radials, a Palomar common-mode choke, and a guy rope if it is needed. The system’s been out on the trail now at least 60 times and has been flawless, whether I’m using the [Z] vertical or Gabil’s.
The tripod is US$140 at Amazon right now, maybe a little pricey for a tripod, but after having used it so much, I feel like it is made well and will last many years, and I’m happy to pay a little more for that.
