This page describes the YBB Wire Winder system for radials for amateur radio vertical antennas and why I have come up with this design to make winding up vertical antenna radial wires easy.
I’m in the process of using my 50 foot fibreglass push up mast as a multiband vertical antenna as often referred to these days as a DXCommander. The build of that is detailed here:
https://g1ybb.uk/tmf-3-based-dxcommander-style-vertical-portable-antenna/
But one thing I have already discovered in various tests is the wire radials for the ground plane are a complete pain in the butt to deploy and untangle. If you do not spend some time at pack up taming the wires you are surely going to regret it next time!
My radials are in bunches of 6 soldered into one ring terminal per 6. Six wires really love building birds nests for some reason. Currently I am coiling up each wire and securing it with tape, then putting the set of six into a bag to isolate them from all others. This works but is very time consuming and will fail when raining as the tape won’t stick. Here is one set:
As I have several sets of radials of differing lengths I needed to come up with a better solution to make it faster and easier. After some pondering I have come up with The YBB Wire Winder System for radials.
In previous builds I have made winding spools for wire dipoles such as seen on this page:
https://g1ybb.uk/3d-printed-wire-winding-spool-for-sota-hf-dipole/
which is OK and works for the two legs of a dipole but would be tedious for 20 or more radials for the vertical antenna. So I decided something like that but operated mechanically by my battery screwdriver could be the answer. I have some extra long screwdriver bits like these:
Mine are not quite as long but they have 7cm of hex shaft available, plenty to drive my spools.
The spools of course would be 3D printed to my design so I set about designing. A consideration when designing parts for 3D printing must be made to make it easy to actually print. My initial concept is shown here:
There are seven spools, 6 for wire and one to contain the common terminal. I’d already decided the start point of winding needed to be the terminal as winding from the other end would require perfect winding and perfect length to all end up at that common point. But looking at this image above it’s instantly clear printing this is going to need supports, which is material to stop the extruded plastic falling down if nothing is below it. Here the orientation shown is probably the best way to try to print it but each of the 7 spool cores will need support as they are in space. The larger diameter side cheeks would actually print OK as shown as each layer will slightly overlap the previous one to start building the circles.
But I hate prints with supports, usually leaves a mess when you take them off. Plus I wasn’t sure exactly how big the spools needed to be. So the answer was to make it modular which mean I could also print one test spool at a time.
The modular spool above can be printed in that orientation perfectly with no supports required at all.
Then it was a case of making a set of parts with differing features depending on their position in the stack.
Above is shown spool2. this has the features of the wire slot to pass a single wire through to the outermost spool (spool1) and a wire retention feature. And some filament saving and drainage holes. And two 3mm holes for M3 studding to assemble the whole assembly.
The above animation shows the assembly. If you pause at the start you will be able to see more details and features. You can see the narrow centre section with a peg for the ring terminal and the bottom of the wire slots have a cutout at the core for 3 wires, then 2 wires to sit in. The right hand side spool is made from two half height spools back to back so all can be printed easily as described above.
This drawing shows the different parts. Only spool3 is used twice here. This could be a 4 wire assembly just as easily, by omitting both spool3 instances.
Here is a PDF of the same drawing for better detail:
https://g1ybb.uk/docs/YBB%20Wire%20Winder%20system.PDF
All very good but does the YBB Wire Winder system actually work?
Time to test it out.
After manually deploying the radials in the garden, here is the packing away sequence. I cock it up a bit at the start but it was my 1st go!
You’ll notice I have some M8 nuts tied on the end of each radial to give it a little weight when setting them out in the fan arrangement. I’m brushing the edges of the spools to help keep the wires spooling in the correct partition.
And here we have the deployment:
You’ll notice in deployment once there was about 3 feet on the ground it all un-spooled very well. This will save me a massive about of messing around at setup and tear down!
Some practical notes…
The above pic shows the YBB Wire Winder system loaded up with 6 radials that are each 5 metres long. The wire I have used is 2 x 0.5mm² red and black speaker wire split into two wires as it was the most cost effective way of getting the many metres of wire required. You can see there is plenty of capacity left but I also have longer radials that I will see if they will fit the same size spool. If not, for greater capacity it is probably easier to to increase the width between the spool cheeks.
Update: I have just wound a 10m length of the 0.5mm² wire onto the spool and there is capacity for more still.
Printing your own!
I shall be sharing the STL files so anyone else can print some for their own portable setup. I’ve not uploaded them yet as they are freshly off the press (printer). These are printed in PLA+ and seem fine. PETG would be even better. I printed with 4 walls and 25% infill. The holes for the M3 studding I clear out with a 3.0mm drill bit in a battery drill which I think is better than making the holes oversize enough to be a clearance on the M3 studding. The hex centre for the driver bit has enough clearance to not require post printing attention.
STL files as of today can be downloaded here:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6928231