Antennas

With my neighbor's Adriana help I riveted the doubler to the skin tonight and installed the transponder antenna.

Fabricated a doubler for the transponder antenna. I've decided to install it in the same compartment as the pitch A/P servo behind the baggage bulkhead. Drilled the doubler to the bottom fuse skin. Dimpled the doubler and used the close quarters dimple dies to dimple the skin. Drilled the center hole for the antenna with a unibit to 1/2 inch.

Worked on the comm antennas installation after having manufactured two doublers as the bottom skin is fairly thin and can use some reinforcement. Match-drilled the doublers to the skin first. I used a unibit to drill the center hole out to 7/16 inch for the antenna BNC connector.

After deburring I countersunk the doublers on the bottom side and dimpled the skin with my close-quarters dimple die.

Next was match drilling the screw holes of the antenna base to the doubler. A #21 seemed to be the right size for that. When fitting the antenna for the first time I noticed that a male BNC would not fit all the way onto the female connector. So I drilled out the doubler hole to 9/16 inch and that did the trick. The skin/doubler combination was just too thick.

Lastly I riveted the doublers to the bottom skin with AN3 4.5 rivets.