Antennas In an HOA Controlled Community
In March of 2022 I moved from Maryland to Florida. In Maryland I had over an Acre and lived where there was no HOA. I had a 50 ft tower with lots of antennas, wire antennas and even a LEO Pack for working satellites.
I moved to The Villages in Florida which is a great community but part of what makes the community so great is the HOA and everything they do. But like most HOAs they do not allow antennas other than TV and Satelite antennas.
What is a ham radio operator to do? Fortunately there are lots of Amateur Radio operators already here that have figured it out. As long as the antenna is not obviously visible the HOA does not really say much.
In this post I am going to go through all of the different antennas I have setup now. Then in my next post I will go over what my shack looks like in this new location.
Lets start with the HF antennas. Here in the villages there are more HF operators than there are operators on VHF / UHF.
I started out with 5 different wire antennas. Here is what I have:
x2 10 meter dipoles
15 meter dipole
17 meter dipole
80 meter half wave end-fed antenna
All of the dipoles are in the attic and run the roof line so they are in somewhat of an inverted V layout.
The 2 10 meter dipoles are 90 degrees to each other. I wanted to try and see if I could select the direction by using the different antennas.
For the 80 meter half wave, the antenna goes out the soffit and up on the roof. The wire goes around the roof and is just under the edge of the 4th row of shingles. The ground (Counterpoise) goes to an 8ft ground rod right outside of the shack.
All 5 of these antennas connect to a remote antenna switch in the attic. So from the shack I can select the antenna I want to use.
As far as performance goes, the 10, 15 and 17 work pretty well. Much better than I thought they would being in an attic I was unsure what the shingles would do to the signal.
The 80 meter wire antenna is a bit of a mixed bag of performance. It works pretty good on 20 and 40 meters. On 80 it has a slightly high SWR but the bigger problem is the height above ground is not high enough and has a very high takeoff angle so the distance is not great.
As a teaser before we get to some pictures, I have purchased a flagpole antenna and we will dig into that next, but first, below are some pictures of the antennas in the attic and on the roof.
A very popular stealth antenna here in The Villages is a flagpole antenna.. I purchased a 20’ off-center dipole flagpole antenna from Greyline Performance Antennas. I chose the off-center dipole because it does not require ground radials.
The other popular type is a vertical with radials. Some make their own flagpole antennas and some members of the radio club have some very interesting methods for ground planes too.
This antenna is very new and I am still tweaking parts of it so I cannot provide details on its performance yet. For a flagpole antenna it is highly recommended that the tuner be right next to the antenna. That means a remote tuner is needed. I have purchased a MFJ remote tuner. The tuner is powered via coax cable. It has been recommended that 1:1 balun be placed between the tuner and transceiver which would break the power feed via coax. The remote tuner can take other power input via a plug so that means another cable needs to be pulled. I am still working out the details on how to isolate and power the tuner.
Below are some pictures of how I get the cable from the shack to antenna and the antenna itself. As you can see, it looks like any other flagpole. The only thing that gives away it is more than a flagpole is the remote tuner. Once the bushes grow some it will not even be noticeable.
So we just covered the HF antennas so lets jump to everything else. You might notice that I did not mention VHF/UHF. That was on purpose because I have more than just VHF/UHF going on up in the attic.
I am going to start with the VHF/UHF though. When I moved here I gave away most of the antennas I had on the tower. I had intentions of putting antennas in the attic but most of them were too tall to fit in the attic. I did keep a couple though and used then. I also had some other antennas, some were 5/8 mobile antennas, other were mobiles with ground plane, etc.
Because they were shorter they would fit in the attic. Some were magnetic mount and need a ground plane as well. In the pictures later you will see I got some sheet metal for the magnetic mounts for a ground plane and to attach the magnet to.
In addition to the VHF/UHF antennas for working repeaters and simplex I have a QFH for receiving satellites, I have a discone for connecting to a scanner, an ADSB antenna for receiving airplane telemetry, a 915 MHZ for LoraWan, GMRS, a 1.2 ghz antenna connected to my IC-9700 and I will talk about some other things I have up there too.
Lets get to the list of antennas up in the attic:
Dual Band Groundplane (Kenwood D-710)
Long Dual Band - Comet (FTM-400)
Long Dual BandI - Comet (D-5100)
GMRS - Comet (GMRS)
Dual Band Groundplane (Yaesu 7900)
Quad Band - Diamond (Yaesu 8900)
ground plane (anytone 578)
QFH (SDR)
ADSB (ADSB Receiver)
LORA (LoraWan)
1.2 g antenna - Diamond (IC-9700)
Dual Band Groundplane Spare 1
Dual Band Groundplane Spare 2
Mag Mount Spare 3
Discone (Scanner)
Tall Mag Mount - Comet (9700 - VHF/UHF)
Tall Mag Mount - Comet (BBS)
So that is the list of antennas. I listed the brand if I knew it and what radio in the shack it is connected to. If you see the 3 spares, I have in the shack 3 jacks where I can connect radio equipment to test and if needed also to a radio if one of the other antennas has issues.
The next question you may be asking is how I am getting all of this into the shack from the attic. We had a new room added onto the house and when they were building it I had 2 2inch PVC pipes installed. At the old house I had a patch panel made with HF connectors in the shack. That was put in the attic and all of the cables from the shack connect to one side and the cables go from there to the antennas. The ports are numbered and each cable running into the shack has a cable label on both ends.
All of this will be in the following pictures including what was done in the shack to bring the cables through the wall. After the pictures, I will list the last few items that are also in the attic and some of it is ham radio related as well.
Those of you that know me know I like to experiment with all types of digital technology related to radio. One of the technologies I experiment with is AREDN. In the attic I have 2 AREDN nodes in the attic. They run over POE and connect to the AREDN network in the house.
I also experiment with different LORA technologies. The LORA antenna already mentioned is connected to a LORAWan device. Additionally I have been experimenting with Meshtastic. I have a new meshtastic node in the attic. The entire node is in a waterproof case with a 10 db gain antenna on top. I also have another LORA device in the attic with just a 3db antenna. It is a project I have been working on to take the weather data from my weather sensor and send it over lora. I have a project video coming soon about that project.
So there it is…. My adventures in radio antennas in an HOA controlled community. There are lots of good resource out there and The Villages Amateur Radio Club has some on its website. Here is a link to a presentation on some of the different ways people have hidden their antennas: https://www.k4vrc.com/uploads/1/0/1/5/10156032/present-tvarc_antenna_guide.pdf
And one more: https://www.k4vrc.com/homebrew.html
