Antenna launchers
A project that I and SA7BIK Mats did a little bit of work with is a way to shoot up antennas in a good way. The first project became a slingshot of larger dimensions. We have built a prototype that works well, we shot a tennis ball about 25 m above a tree without any problems. We used a fishing reel with braided rope and an unfilled tennis ball. It worked best we think. We also tried to fill a tennis ball with gravel but it became too heavy, maybe 15 meters up. We shot up an 80m vertical ”19.5m wire” and it hung almost vertically so I guess the tree was about 17m high and then the ball flew maybe 5 meters above the tree. We have some problems with the ball hitting the beams when shooting, but otherwise it works well. We also have a variant with narrower shafts that we will test. It has a bit smaller beam shoes so the presumption is tennis balls too big for it, but we were going to try with a golf ball and see how it works. Here in the pictures we see how the result was.
