Neighbor covenants and restrictions on extrnal antennas can severly limit amateur radio performance. When we were house hunting for the move back to Texas, I looked at quite a few attics as well as elevation maps. Austin is located on the edge of Texas "hill country"; so, it is not flat. We found a that met all our other requirements and is located on top of a 1050' ridge. I was looking for large attics with high cielings and did not want foil backed reflective roof surfaces. After the move from Portland, the work began with installing plywood flooring, lighting, and power in the attic space. This was no picnic in the Austin summer temperatures! The den on the ground level of the house is my radio shack. I was able to find a chase in a wall at the end of a second floor hallway that allowed coax and rotor feeds to run in PVC conduit from the attic to the den. Feeds to the UHF and 927 MHz repeaters are routed to the second floor home brew & test room.
The current residents of the antenna farm are as follows:
10 GHz operation with a 1M X .65M offset feed dish with LNA and 12w PA mounted at feed point.
10 GHz dish Az-El remote control is with a Vicon remote pan-tilt camera positioner,
HF operation with a loop of 0.25" copper tubing around the perimeter of the house feed by a 10KW CWS 4:1 balun (QRO OK),
6M operation with a phase steerable array of four loaded dipoles. One pair is NE-SW and the other is NW-SE.
Phase steering of the driven pair of elements is done with a homebrew ethernet interface.
144 MHz and 432 MHz weak signal operation with an array of three stacked short-boom log-periodic beams,
222 MHz weak signal operation with a stacked pair of folded dipole big wheels,
902 MHz weak signal operation with an M2 17-element Yagi,
902 MHz weak signal operation with a circular collinear omni (4 wheels),
1296 MHz weak signal operation with an M2 22-element Yagi,
1296 MHz weak signal operation with a circular collinear omni (5 wheels),
902 / 927 MHz FM operation with 6 dB Scala V-polarized omni,
902 / 927 MHz FM repeater operation with 9 dB Scala V-polarized omni (100W repeater on site),
443 / 448 MHz FM repeater operation with 6 dB Phelps-Dodge V-polarized omni (100W repeater on site),
70cm FM link (927 repeater) operation Diamond X-50 V-polarized omni,
70cm FM link (EchoLink K5TRA-R) operation and 2M remote base - Diamond X-50 V-polarized omni,
2M / 70cm FM operation Diamond X-50 V-polarized omni,
2M / 70cm FM operation (yes, another) Diamond X-50 V-polarized omni.
Remote homebrew PA - LNA units on 144, 222, 432, 902, and 1296 MHz are located neat the antennas.
On 2.304 GHz and 10.368 GHz remote transverter, LNA and PA units are located near the antennas.
The attic amtenna farm also has remote (TCPIP) ON/OFF control of AC power for all attic located transverters, LNA's and PA's. Due to the limited number of 9913 coax runs, several crossband couplers (band split diplexers) are used to share runs.
