Aerial photography - Ancient Gallery

Antiference’s first mass produced UHF aerials had strange names like ‘Hunter’ and ‘Explorer’, but which was which I can’t remember. Let’s hope some old boy of my age group from Antiference sees this and offers help! Anyway, the dipole was a simple folded strip. There was a balun in the connection box, hanging below the dipole. The connection box and contents were attached to the aerial by the two terminal screws, and these had to be really tight or rain would get in! The cable entry was at the bottom of the box, so it wasn’t obvious how to secure the coax, as this example shows.

The box on the chimney bracket looks like a UHF/VHF diplexer, which makes sense because there was obviously once a VHF TV aerial atop that now truncated mast. Note also that one of the rivets on the chimney bracket has failed, leaving the arm of the bracket to hang down. Despite the fact that UHF aerials generally need to be as high as possible, most of the very early ones were attached as afterthoughts to VHF arrays, so they were often fitted at the bottom of the mast. The clamp supplied with these aerials had a swivel and tilt action, because much was made at the time of the need to adjust the new UHF aerials very precisely to whatever peculiar position worked best.

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