Antenna Mounting

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I received the Tarheel 75 antenna today and test fitted it onto the truck. I was a little concerned before ordering that the edge of the bed would not be stable enough to properly support it, and I believe those concerns were founded. While it does fit onto the lip of the bed just fine, and will stay upright, I’m not comfortable with the amount of rocking I can make it do and the long term prospects of it, so I pulled it off for now and decided to look for a way to reinforce the lip. After some consideration, I decided to wrap the lip of the bed in angle iron.

I checked Home Depot but couldn’t find any angle iron with longer than 2″ wall lengths, but have 3″ to deal with to cross the lip on the bed. So I went to Amazon and found some 3″ x 3″ A36 3/8″ angle iron, in 72″ length. I also bought a new cutting disc for my angle grinder, some #8 x 3/4″ self tapping screws, some diodes and a wireless switch.

When the angle iron comes in next Monday, I’m going to cut it down to 63.5″ – the width between the bed rails – and spray it with black enamel. To make mounting and getting to the cables easier, I’m going to further drill out the holes in the bed so that the PL259 connectors will fit through them and I can mount the studs directly to the angle iron before securing it to the bed with the self tapping screws. I’m a little worried about the studs working with the 3/8″ thick steel, but feel the extra stability it should offer over 1/8″ is going to be worth whatever hassle that creates. If I’m still not happy with the stability once adding the angle iron, I’ll grab some more and weld together some supports that run to the floor of the bed. I also had to order two 3′ x 1″ copper grounding straps to use on the two outer antennas because this is going to be well insulated from the bed due to the bedliner and it’s good practice to have them. I’ll probably run them down to the frame.

I bought the diodes because I plan to use relays to power on the radios (one for the TM-D710G, one for the 990SSB and BCD536HP and two for the TS-480HX) and want both the ignition and a wireless switch to be able to trigger them. I don’t want the power from the switch sending electricity down to the ignition, and vice-versa. I’m actually not sure how big of an issue this would be, but diodes are cheap and will restrict the flow to a single direction.