When I made my lightweight aluminium portable contest mast I designed up an ultralight strong mast guying ring to use that was both strong and light. I designed it for my friend to injection mould in a fibreglass reinforced plastic that is really strong. The material is so strong I could not damage a 1.5mm thick long credit card size sample by hand even across the edge of a table. All I did was hurt my hands.
So with one eye on weight and one on strength this is the design I came up with. The design criteria was that these rings would hold up a mast carrying a decent sized 144MHz long yagi with at least a 5m boom on an exposed mountain summit in winds at least as strong as the tent will take but also be nice and light and small. They are very similar to many others you will see (there’s only so many ways a guy ring can be designed), but this is only 61.5mm outer diameter and 14.2 grams in weight:
I went for the simple 4 holes rather than extra holes for 3 point guying that some rings offer as it’s easy enough to just use 3 of the holes. Rope holes are 5.8mm which is plenty big enough for 550lb paracord or other ropes you would use with a lighter weight mast system. The centre hole is 20.5mm sized to fit the top section of my mast. For the lower thicker section it’s easy to open the centre hole with a step drill, in my case 26mm. 30mm is about as big as I would open it too though to retain full strength.
When the rings arrived in the post the first job was to test it for strength. I figured I would make a good test load. Just needed something to hang off and give it some welly. I am a good 170lbs, probably more with boots and big coat on. The rucksack is full of 2 litre bottles of water, probably a good 30lbs more easy. So about 200lbs bouncing weight on the guy ring. This is on a very short length of paracord. A longer length will absorb more shock like a climbing rope does:
Once I was happy with them fitted to the mast and the guy ropes tied on:
And in action:
These rings will also be very useful for SOTA activations where the very ultralight commercially available rings may be a little brittle without adding a noticeable weight penalty. Used for a fishing pole mast the mast will break long before these rings will!
I mentioned that these could be ideal for other radio hams doing SOTA activations and other portable operations wanting a very strong but lightweight guy ring he has made these available (pretty much any quantity) on his website:
https://dura-id.store/product/lightweight-mast-guy-ring