I decided that I was tired of having to make a big coax loop around the guy ropes in my portable setups in order to be able to rotate the mast. It’s never ideal and also on windy days the coax can be waving back and forth continuously, potentially creating fatigue to expensive feeders.
So I designed my own guy rings to over come this.
These have a slot inside the circle of guy rope attachment points so the coax can be run straight down the pole and not foul. A small amount of slack gives enough movement to cover the degrees with no slot. I always erect the mast so that the no slot portion is to my least pointed direction so the coax rarely even reaches there.
To protect the pole and the coax from the stainless steel guy rings I sandwich the ring between two plastic bearings which overhang the internal and external diameters of the centre part of the guy rings:
The smaller ring is designed to fit 1.5 inch poles and is 4mm thick stainless. I use this myself for backpacking, both on a short single yagi pole and also on a 10m high array mast. There are four guy holes, I have used 3 and 4 guys equally well.
The larger ring will fit both scaffold poles and 50mm/2 inch poles. I cut different bore bearings for each as a 2 inch bearing would be too sloppy for my liking on a scaffold pole. The ring is 6mm thick stainless and has hole patterns for 4 and 3 guy rope systems. The slot is also slightly wider for thicker feeders. 25mm slot on the scaffold ring, 23mm slot on the 1.5 inch ring. Both will pass an N-type plug.
There are several options for the guy ring to sit on:
You can use the saddle from 2x exhaust clamps and two bolts:
It can sit on a joiner used to make the mast up:
You can also use a scaffold handrail joiner:
On 1.5 inch, 2 inch and 50mm poles you can use the best option of all in my opinion, a shaft collar. You can see mine in the video lower down:
Lastly (from me, I’m sure other options are there) you can buy aluminium Stauff clamps to fit all poles sizes including scaffold poles, amazingly. The video below I made putting the prototype together shows the Stauff clamps on a scaff pole:
Here you can see one in operation (before I started sandwiching the ring between two bearings):
Contact me at my email (see the welcome page) if you are interested in these guys rings, I made them for myself to use but I do have spares.