Modifying my 6 Meter LFA-R with new element brackets
Last year I had a accident with my big 6 meter antenna. It is a 6 el. LFA-R reflectorless Yagi that I bought 3 years ago from Innovantennas.com in UK. When looking at there site, you can see they have changed element brackets fron one to two.
It was in the stormy season of 2021 in the winter, that one of the big elements broke of the boom and fell down and hit through my garage roof about 20cm from my solarpanels. Luckely I was not at home with my car when it happened, but could see that something was sticking up from the roof of my garage. It could have gone teriable wrong and gone all the way trough my roof and down in my car.
I desided at once to take the antenna down so that not more could go wrong, and when I saw the antenna at close, the element was broken of close to the antenna bracket holder. It was not the season for 6 meter, so I waited to the spring to make new brackets.
I have a 3D printer and made some new brackets for the elements on the boom in Fusion 360. The old one’s I think, are to small to take the weight of the big elements in windy conditions. the new ones are printet in PTG that are UV resistant and are also wery strong in the material. The infill of the 3D print is set to 80 % to get enough strengh. On the picture on top of this page, you can see the differens between the original and my bracktes. First time I printet them, I forgot that there is a little top under the brackets that gets up, but that is changed in the layout of the brackets. There are 4 pieces in 45mm width and one in 40mm for the first element because the first part of the boom is smaller. The dipole brackets are not changed, because there are 3 brackets to hold it and one is in metal for the grounding.
There is one thing I diden’t like when the accident occured, and that was that the element went down from the antenna in 22 meter high, and could hit something on the way down. I desided therefore to put strings inside the elements so that when one element is breaking off, it will not fall down, but hang with rest of the element up in the air, until I get it down. 🙂
If you have the same problem you can download my STL files and print them your self. Or maybe this page could give you and idea on how to better secure your antenna to not get an accident like me :-). If you can’t print – contact me and we will find a solution.