Putting Up An Antenna

What do you do when you have a ham radio and you're out in the boonies, and you need an antenna, as high up as feasible?

You launch it. Here's my co-conspirator, Jed, with the antenna launcher he built from PVC pipe and a lawn sprinkler valve

He's holding a large nerf dart here as it turned out his barrel was the same size as the larger gun/launcher on the porch behind him.

The fat pipe is the air reservoir which we pump up to 60 psi, not wanting to over stress the plastic. Not shown is the small dart made from 2 pipe caps and filled with sand that will carry the line that will pull the antenna wire high up into a tree or something. In testing today we threw the dart just over 100 yards across a flat park.

Here's the trigger. when you vent the top of the valve, the main body opens. Note the tastefully tactical O.D. and flat black paint job. Any operator would be proud.

Here's the business end. The short barrel limits the range but I am assured that what we got was sufficient. I tried to get a pic of the nerf dart leaving the barrel of the gun, but the dart is way faster than the shutter on my pocket camera.