This month, I added a 3D Printed Antenna Brace to my orthogonal wideband loop array antennas. Seems to work well.

We have had a cool and windy spring in Calgary. A couple of times, my wideband loops have fallen to the ground during the gusty winds. More times this spring than over the four years these have been up and running.

Calgary has a reputation as a somewhat windy place. But, I searched through weather data online. I could not find that this spring had winds much stronger than over the recent past.

As shown above, my loop antennas are mounted on an ABS mast using 3D printed structures. everything is held together mainly with friction fit and a bit of silicone. My guess is that over the time they have been in operation, the friction fit is no longer as tight as when I started out. Thus, the structures probably have more wobble when pushed by the wind.

As I designed them, the structures will fail gracefully and the antennas can come down undamaged. I thought about making more rigid structures, but I like the modular approach.

With a modular approach, each loop can be built or repaired separately, then the parts just fit together. This would be harder with a single, monolithic structure.

3D Printed Antenna Brace to the Rescue

So, I designed and added a 3D printed antenna brace to each of the orthogonal loops. The bottom of my brace fits around the ABS mast, with two strong arms that extend and are fastened to both sides of the loop. You can see that these arms should reduce windy wobble of the loop perpendicular to the mounting fence.

For the loop in-line with the fence, I am using some plastic clamps and nylon rope to reduce wobble in that direction.

So far, everything seems stable in both directions. We had a big hail storm with strong winds a couple of days ago, and it all held up. I don’t do a lot of 3D printing these days, but it sure is handy when needed. Designing the brace in CAD and printing the parts only took a few hours.