The Ham Radio two point zero Audio podcast rip. Thank you for downloading and listening to this podcast. So basically what I do is I take all the audio clips out of my videos and upload them to spreaker and then from there they're spread out to iTunes and SoundCloud and now Amazon Audible as well. But I want to welcome you and thank you for joining the audio section of this
series on Ham Radio. I hope you enjoy it, and I would appreciate you leaving us a comment or a review on whatever podcast service you're listening from. Thank you in seventy three. I hope you enjoy it. It's been about three years since I've built a hex beam on camera. I emphasized the on camera part for people like kad m Ord that want to tell me I can't build in tennis. So this is the brand new twenty twenty three version
of the Buddy HECKX, the hex Beam from Buddy Poole. I got brand new legs and since then what's changed is well, first of all, the winders have changed. These are new winders that I had. There's new winders that I got from Buddypole. Two elements on that winder, two on that wind er two on that winder. Instead of the ring terminals, it now has loop terminals that we will put onto this mast after we build it. These are the same guy wires and guy rings that they had last time.
He changed the tension calls it a tensioner Buddy HECKX tensioner. He changed it to yellow from blue, and he put a neat sticker on the bag so that audio increased the gain by like ten or twelve dB. This right here will be explained later for Dawn in five SKT. And then of course we've got the mast Works tripod. This is the thirty foot MassWorks tripod, and we're gonna put this all together now, so stay tuned, all right. Specifically for Don, Don had a good question. I'd like to tease Don,
he's a good sport, but he actually had a good question. This is the mast, the center mast, and the mass Works tripod, and this threaded top piece is for the original Buddy Pole Deluxe, the single element dipole that he makes. So what we do is we take this off if I can do it with one hand, because I'm holding one holding the camera with one hand right there. What we do is push that button in take that off, and then the hex beam the buddy heck sits on top of
this, so we don't use this at all. And it's something I didn't include in my last video on Don and was asking about it because he recently got a hex beam. Hex beams are shipping, so be patient if you're on the waiting list. But it was a good question if something I didn't cover my first video, so thanks Don for pointing that out. So what we do is we take the center masked out. This is the seven section mast that comes with the thirty foot mass Works tripod, and then we put
in this build mast. And this has done specifically for people who are five foot three inches tall like myself, who don't want to build the hex being when it's up here in the air, So you get to build the hex being from down here on the bottom, and then the hex beam itself sits up three or four or five different feet like that. So you'll see that here in a minute, so stay tuned and keep watching for what it looks
like when it's done. But this center mast right here replaces this piece that comes out of the middle of the tripod, and then we insert this piece here so that we can build it lower to the ground. So let's get started, okay. Step one, well step three actually, because we've already set up the tripod and the mast. These are the legs, and these go on first. The strap here is very handy because it holds everything together. And in the center of this this is the center mast for the hex
beam and these are the six legs of the hex beans. This all fits together really well. So I'm gonna take these six pieces out. And he's got these wrapped around the center mast here, and that's okay. There's a couple different ways to wrap these. These are guy wires, is what they are, paracord type material. There's a couple of different ways to wrap these, and you can do what however you want to, but this is probably
the most efficient. Yours is going to come this way, wrapped between here and here, untangled it the way you want to, and when you're ready to pack back up, pack it back up the way you want to. And this right here is the center post that will go on to the build masks that we're going to have right here. So this piece right here fits over the center spot. Open this up, push that down, clamp that down right there, and now we've got the whole thing. So this right
here is the BNC connector. This is the BNC feed point, and it's one feed point for all six bands on the antenna. This is twenty meters at the top, seventeen, fifteen, twelve, ten and six. Now, the great thing about the buddy hecks is that this color black, gray, yellow, red, green, and blue is the same color for all of these wires. This is black and gray. These separators are black and gray. These separators are red and yellow. So that's the twenty meter right
there, and these are green and blue. So you know which one goes where. And obviously the six meter one is going to be shorter of a wire than the twenty meter one, so it's easy to tell which one goes which. Now what you can do, and I think what I'm gonna do because this is a field day, right six, ten, twelve meters and seventeen meters. The yellow and the green one are not allowed at field day, so I think I'm just gonna skip those. I'm not going to even
put those on today. You could put all six on. You could put one on, you could put two on, you could put any combination if you want on. It's all fed from the same feed point, and you can see how that looks. The original version didn't have these separators in here. It had a post here and a post here with nothing in the middle of this post. So these were added later and they provide stability to the center mass there. So that's really good. So I'm gonna put on put
on these legs next, and we'll go from there. Okay, this is one of six legs, and all six legs are the same, so it doesn't matter which one you put wear. And all of them have three sections. They go together like this right there, and then you put those and just like that to there to the center mask. Wow, I've had too much to drink today. There we go, and then that one sits there, and all six of them go into each one. And again it doesn't
matter which one is which. They're all the same, so you don't have to put one in the specific spot or something like that. People ask that all the time. So we're gonna put up all six of these after I untangle them, because I made it really mess, a big mess. Here. There we go, and we're gonna put them all out just like we did the first so the end of this has a parachord coming out the top
and one coming out what I would call the right side. If you look at it like this, it's the right side if you look at it from here as the left side, but the top paracord goes to the center mast. I've got two of the masts up already right here, and if you look at this part you zoom in right there. It's got a little slit in the end of it, and it kind of creates a t after you put it in the centerpiece here, so the te s through there and then
it's tea behind there. You can't really see it as dark anyway, but that holds it in place. So all six legs connect here, and then once you get all six legs placed, you will connect the second parachord coming out of each leg to the leg next to it, So at the end it'll make a big HEXBA makes a circle six legs that are all connected at the center mast that are also all connected to each other around the perimeter.
So that's what we're doing right now. So I have put on the six meter and the ten meter and if you look right here, you can zoom in right there. The wires go, the elements go underneath. This is an important part that Chris from Buddy Pole told me. So you point this downward like this right here, it'll spin all the way around. So what you do is you point it downward and you hang the wires underneath the feet right there. So this is the six meter obviously, this is the ten
meter. This is the twelve meter, which I'm not going to put up today because we can't use that at field anyway. So I'm stringing up the fifteen meter right now, unwinding it and springing at the same time. It's kind of clipping right there. This is the last leg of it here. Okay, this comes over into the V part here and then that hook terminal. So before we had the ring terminals on the end of the elements, and we had to take this piece completely off and put the ring terminal over
it and then put this piece back. So with these hook terminals like this like that, you don't have to do that. So that's an improvement over the last one that I built. On a video like this, and if you look, if you come back like this, well, first of all, let me show you this. Also, these slide down to these stoppers
like this one right here. This is the seventeen meter. I'm not going to hang that one either, but this you slide them down all the way down as far as they'll go closest to as far as they'll go close to the center, and that's the correct measurement and length of the element. So it's flexible a little bit. But this slides up and down, and then this v right here. This is the direction that the beam is pointed.
So when you get it up in the air and you want to rotate it, this is the your beam is pointed right here, so of course it rotates three hundred and sixty degrees and this is the way that it's pointed. So right now we're pointed basically east, basically east. But the thing is with a hex beam, I've talked off the side in the back of a hex beam many times, so it's sort of directional, but not really the way a hex beam works. If you don't know, it's actually two elements.
So this part in the middle right here, this is paracord that separates this element, which is if I get my terminology correct, this is the director and then the back element. There is these three legs which is the reflector. So it's like a two meter yang. So it's got one element in the back, one element in the front that are separated by parachord just a time together. There's not an electrical connection between these two. And then
the director resonates from the reflector in it points this way. So that's the entire hex beam right now. So we're gonna put I'm gonna put the twenty meter element on and then we're gonna raise it up. I've got all of the elements on the antenna that I want, so now I've got to lift the hex beam off of the built mast and put it back onto the regular push up mast so that we can have the antenna set up the way it
is supposed to be. So here goes. Watch this. This is an oblong mast on the mast works, and it's supposed to keep it from when the wind blows it from turning around the mast. A lot of round masts when when the beam gets turned by the wind, it'll just kind of turn around the mast. This one's supposed to keep that from happening, and pretty much it does. It's got a little bit of movement, a little bit of play in it, but for the most part, it keeps it from
moving. So now we just got to put it up. We need to do the guy wires now, so that's the next part. Today's video is sponsored by Kyle's tackle Box. So this video today is sponsored by Messi and Polony Coax. It's not messy, but it's very clean. This is the ultra Flex seven Sihara and we've run this. I know we've run the Sahara on the on the Buddy hex before, maybe not the seven, I don't know, it was one of them. It was the Sahara. Check out
the link in the description. Blow save a five percent discount of gigaparts with the coupon code of casey five him meet for this very very awesome coax. Well, so do not set up the hex beam without putting the coax on first. I'm not going to tell you how I know that. So this is the BNC feed point that is made by by Buddy Pole. Obviously this
will handle about six maybe seven hundred something like that. I personally run five hundred and fifty wots from kPa five hundred through this connection into the Buddy Hex. The Buddy hecks itself will handle legal limit, but he's working on a new connector that will be I believes two thirty nine that will be legal limits. So this one actually won't handle fifteen hundred wats. I think he said this one will do up to a kill a watt, maybe nine hundred one
something like that, but I don't know. Ask Chris at Buddy Pole and see what he says. But we're only running a hundred ways for field Day, so it doesn't matter. So I've got this all connected up and I'm going to connect it. I'm going to strap it down here. So the
hex beam was pretty much a fantastic hit all weekend. Between it and the d X commander, we were able to work all the bands we wanted to work, including six meters, which sadly was not really We never really saw any activity on six f T eight, so oh well, I've tuned over there a few times, never really saw much. But it was on fire on Thursday when we were here. We were working some six ft eight Thursday night, and wow, I was hoping it would be like that for field
Day, but no, such lucky thing. I didn't I say, I didn't do it properly. It got set up correctly and that's fine, but there's a specific way to set up the Mastworks tripod and guy it before you put the hex beam on it. And since I did the hex Beam build video this time, I just kind of haphazardly put up the MassWorks tripod. But I realized that not even in my last video to that show how to
put up the MassWorks tripod correctly the way that Buddy Pole suggests it. Again, you can do it however you want to, but there's a really easy way to do it that makes sense. So next time we'll hit that one. Check the links in the description, blow and thank you.