Test Equipment Anonymous

May all your repairs be successful and your auction wins be low.

Cheers!

I have already had an inadvertent success, with the self-demolition of my pergola.

Ages ago, I stuck a "Dick Smith" 2m vertical antenna up on the pergola alongside the house, using an existing steel reinforcing bracket I had fitted to allow me to remove car engines back in the day.

The bracket was bolted to a large jarrah horizontal beam which supported the house end of all the cross beams of the pergola.
By pure serendipity, the two mounting holes on the bracket were the same spacing as some loops on a piece of pipe which was part of a scrapped rotary clothes hoist, so the pipe, plus antenna was quickly erected.

Time mooches on, the pergola was showing its age, & showing its original poor construction.
Eventually, a "Gang nail " assembly which was holding one end of the barge board at the back of the carport became "unstuck", revealing that it was all that was holding the vertical part of the pergola upright, & all the "posts" took on a pronounced lean. (If I had realised how insecure the whole thing was, I would not have used it to remove & replace a V8 engine plus Auto trans assembly back in the day).
All this happened round about the time my left knee had reached its "use by date".
After getting a "pretend one" fitted, I lost interest in messing with such things, till fairly recently.

Looking at it again, I conceived the idea of making some "Props" to securely hold the posts vertical, so I could remove all the other big bits of wood without dropping them on me, my dogs or through some windows.
To this end, I needed to push the end post upright, but when trying a "test push", the whole guts came adrift & ended with the horizontal bits on the ground, & the vertical posts leaning on the fence, all without squashing an Old Fart, a dog, or anything else.

My neighbour stuck his head over the fence to make sure aforesaid O.F. hadn't killed himself & had a bit of a chuckle.
The "Dick Smith" antenna has "gone to antenna heaven" but I have a replacement in the form of a "homebrew" (by someone else) 2m halfwave vertical.
Anyhow, "all's well that ends well" as I can cut up the wood & clear the area, & probably re-use some of the setup to mount the new 2m antenna on the original pipe, as well as to support one end of some shade cloth.
I doubt that the original coax is any good anymore but can check it with the nanoVNA.

Most of the above is lifted from a post I made on QRZ.com----I hope they don't claim copyright!

Just testing stuff... great work guys!!