This is a long story so I’m splitting it up in 3 parts.

So, I have had a few stories about antennas and although I have been making some FT8 contacts with the little sprit on the back of the boat, it is not the best antenna. If you look at my boat there is a long metal wire almost going to the top of the mast. Some boats use that with the aid of insulators to create an antenna. But these are quite expensive. In any case you’d need an antenna tuner to make the antenna work with your transmitter. However as I did some research, one boat owner didn’t bother with the insulators and discovered that a modern antenna tuner can tune the complete rigging! So when I got a discount on the CG-3000 antenna tuner at Wimo, I decided to jump on it and hopefully improve the antenna situation on the boat.

Now this was a couple of months ago and I didn’t have the energy to deal with installing it because the long Covid lockdown just didn’t motivate me very much.

One of the things that are important when using a semi-vertical antenna, is a ground-plane. I already had some 10m of tinned, braided copper wire that seems a decent alternative for a copper strip that is the advised way of connecting to a ground plane. The boat also has a copper plate in the middle of the hull with connectors on the inside that is not used for the grounding of the engine:

But to get there I needed to lay a cable from the starboard aft cockpit locker to the cabin. The spacing is there but I wanted to protect the braided cable from moisture and abrasion. Some garden water hose to the rescue! I used rg-8x coax as a mousing line on the marina to get it all in:

Soldering an eye on one end with a bit of heat shrink to protect it from moisture:

And finally stuffing the open end of the garden hose with CT1:

That should make sure no water is coming into the hose! This was a good point to stop for the day. Tomorrow part 2 when we actually lay the cable.