Having just finished making a lightweight aluminium portable antenna mast for backpacking VHF contesting I wasn’t really happy with the initial way we were tying down the guy ropes.
Typically I have tied off guys that don’t have tensioners with several half hitches. These are quick and easy but they are hard to tie tensioned properly and I have lost two 19 element MET yagis, a Yaesu rotator and an aluminium scaffold pole when one guy worked loose on a windy day. I didn’t want to use tensioners on this setup as they can work loose and we are going to be operating from a tent and won’t see any loose guys until too late most likely. Also I’m using for this mast lightweight paracord which is meant to be good to 550lbs breaking strain, but I am wrapping that around fairly sharp edged aluminium angle guy stakes which might create a weak point on the paracord. The mast is not massive and I have 2 sets of main load bearing guys but I want this to stay up on exposed windy Welsh mountain tops.
So I thought a round bar would be a better shape to tie the guys to and a clove hitch would be a good start knot as it can be tightened up. For the round bar I thought I would use some of my old climbing karabiners. And to attach those to the guy pegs I would use some small sized climbing rope about 6 or 7mm and use a clove hitch to quickly attach those to the pegs.
Here are the karabiners and rope loops. The rope loops were made from about 1m of rope each and a double fisherman knot used to make the loop:
Once the karabiner was fitted to the guy peg it was very quick and easy to make a clove hitch and slip it on, tension, then lock off with a couple of half hitches:
This adds an extra 381grams to carry but I think it will be worth it in the long run. I could probably cut that down with newer smaller and more lightweight climbing karabiners (I’m not going to risk the cheapie ebay style mini ones) and probably a smaller rope would be OK to use:
This is one way of many options, I’d love to hear your methods and tip and tricks!
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