Egg insulators.

[G6Tanuki]

Been doing some HF-antenna stuff recently, and needed a couple of end insulators. Alas the traditional ceramic 'eggs' are no longer available, but my local agricultural supplier has packs of five quite chunky plastic electric-fence insulators for less than £6 per pack.

I've yet to thrash them as dipole-ends dealing with 150W of heavily speech-processed SSB but they look kinda chunky, as would be expected to deal with Kilovolt electric-fence applications.

A little CV785/1T4 B7G pentode is included in the second pic to give an idea of scale.

[Silicon]

I would always go for the black version.

I have seen evidence of surface degradation of the white insulators when they are used for farmyard electric fences. I guess it is due to ultra-violet light damage.

[G6Tanuki]

Good point: these ones are for some short-term experiments where I needed to tie-off radials for a 14/28MHz quarter/half-wave elevated vertical, so they won't need to survive more than a single summer's worth of UV.

[Dave Moll]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

my local agricultural supplier has packs of five quite chunky plastic electric-fence insulators for less than £6 per pack.

... which is a substantial discount on the price on their web site of £8.60+postage.

[AdrianH]

In the tech specs for them it does say UV resistant?

Sounds like a good find.

Adrian