I struggled a bit coming up with a good way to mount my GPS base unit antenna on my steep-pitch shingle roof. I’m sharing these pictures in case what I ultimately came up with can act as inspiration for anyone else struggling with the same.
It is not exactly permanent but it’s more than adequate for what I am doing now. It probably could be permanent and it has the advantage of no roof penetrations but still enough low cg mass that I’m pretty sure it will not move. I used a couple of ~12x24 ceramic tiles I had sitting around and glued them on the backside for better adhesion with PL Premium Polyurethane Construction Adhesive to this weathervane roof mount and then topped it off with this wedge anchor stem. I need to go back up on the roof to add the included washer and nut that came with the anchor to tighten them up to the antenna. I made sure to seal it fairly well with the adhesive so that water shouldn’t be able to get between the mount and the tile, freeze, expand, and separate the two. Yes, an added mechanical fastener or two would have been better but I didn’t feel like drilling through the tile that day! Polyurethane adhesive is tough stuff though and holds very well.
I could even glue a couple of shingles to the tile with some plastic roof cement and the contraption would mostly disappear on the roof. One could also try to find tile that matched the shingles. This mounting location is not visible from where most people would be standing so I was not too worried about color matching.
I ran the coax under the flashing of a powered roof vent fan. You can probably do the same with plumbing vent flashing as well.
I built this flat on the kitchen counter and used a level to keep the two pieces of tile parallel to each other and was careful to line up the weathervane to be parallel to the tile as well.
I’m sure that there are better ways to do this, but maybe it will be helpful to someone. Feel free to share your ideas for improvements or other mount systems that you’ve come up with.
David
