A few of us travelers are Amateur (aka Ham) Radio folks. Some of us do this as a hobby. Some also do this to assist with emergency services. Either way, if you have an expensive Class B that you don't want to poke holes in, it can be daunting to engineer ways around that.
And then of course there is how to keep your antennas from being destroyed by things like tree branches and other objects near to your roof line.
I operate HF as well as VHF and UHF. Since I only desire to operate HF while stationary, this made the installation of a reasonable antenna, reasonably easy to accomplish the no-holes in the van thing. I have the WB factory available roof rack with rear door ladder storage bracket (and ladder). I drill-mounted an antenna mount bracket on the ladder storage bracket to mount the base component of an ALPHA Moto multi-band antenna. When I am parked, I have a six foot, a 9 ft and a long wire that I can attach to the base of this antenna. It is just a quick climb of the ladder to twist-lock the vertical whips in place. If I really want to capture and transmit signals, I attach a long wire instead in an end fed style setup and the world of contacts across several bands is improved.
The ALPHA Moto antenna is an interesting product. It would seem that it's electrical characteristics are not ideal. Until you use one. Yes there are more efficient antennas. I am not talking about SWR specifically. I am talking about Inductance, capacitance and the whole mind warping stuff of antenna theory. Just know that the antenna works pretty darn good as I have made worldwide contacts with this antenna on my JEEP Wrangler over the last two years. Now it has a home on the Travato. Two for two on the first two CW calls by other hams on the air. One a few states away and the other one in Rhode Island; just about as far away in the CONUS-48 states from Idaho as I can get. So I am satisfied that Germany, Japan, Italy, etc. will still be contacts I can make just like this antenna did when installed on the JEEP JK.
For now here are two pictures that show the ALPHA Moto and my VHF antenna. The latter is an unusual "slot" antenna design, posted in the March issue of QST on page 38. After contemplating using the typical vertical antenna for mobile vehicles with a motorized raise/lower device, this antenna just appeared in the QST magazine one day. Perfect solution for VHF; it's omni directional with a vertical polarization, can be magnetic attached and yet does not require the roof as a ground plane. AND it is ONLY three inches tall. I would wipe the Air Conditioner off the roof of the Travato (ahh, not good!) before this antenna would get nailed. Collected parts to fabricate per the magazine article and in just a few days, wala - a perfectly working, amazing performance VHF antenna.
It is placed on a spot on the roof just to the right of the Off the Air TV antenna. The forward side of the antenna is close to the forward cross rail of the
