I spent about a month trying to build a guying solution for the GigaParts Explorer POTA 33. I printed parts, I ran yard tests, I took it camping, and I never once got that mast to stand up straight on its own. In the end I pulled the POTA 33 off my store entirely.
This is the write-up of why. There is a product at the end of it, a guy kit for the POTA 20 that does work, but the useful part is the middle, where it turns out I had the problem backwards.
Why I started with the 33
The POTA 33 is a 33 foot carbon fiber mast that collapses to 27 inches and weighs 1.1 pounds. That is a remarkable thing to be able to carry into a park. It is also very thin at the top. The tip measures 5/32 of an inch, which is a carbon rod a shade under 4mm.
I had already seen what that means in the field. Hang a GMRS J-pole and a feed line off the top and the mast bows badly. It stands, but it bows. My own Freedom Spike is the light duty part in that stack and it is the thing that gives up first, which is deliberate. I would rather break a printed part I can replace for a few dollars than somebody's $180 mast.
So guying looked like the obvious answer. Take the load off the top, stop the bend, and the whole system gets better. I printed a tip topper that press fits over the eye tab at the top of the mast, with six holes spaced so that both three line and four line setups work.
Then I went outside.
Everything I tried, and why each one failed
Three lines from the tip. The mast leaned hard to one side as it went up, and once it leaned I could not recover it. Pulling on the high side line made it worse.
Four lines from the tip. Same result. The number of lines was not the variable.
Pre-cut lines, staked before extending. The theory here was sound. Cut every line to the exact hypotenuse, clip them all to their stakes while the mast is still collapsed, and the lines stay slack the whole way up and come taut at the same instant at full height. The only geometry that satisfies all three at once is vertical. It still leaned.
Slack lines, guy afterwards. Run everything long and loose on the ground, get the mast standing on its own, then walk each line out to its stake and take up the slack. This is the one I was most confident about. It failed too. The mast still pulled hard to one side during extension, and correcting it meant starting the same fight over again.
A camping trip with real space. No fences, no trees, anchor radius as big as I wanted. Same outcome.
At that point I stopped blaming my technique.
The thing I had backwards
I had been thinking about a guy line as something that supports the mast. It is not, at least not while the mast is going up. It is something that pulls on the mast.
An antenna hanging at the tip pulls straight down. That is compression, and a mast is very good at compression. It is why I had raised this same mast with a J-pole and coax aboard, watched it bow alarmingly, and still had it standing when I walked away.
A guy line pulls down and sideways. The moment one of three lines carries slightly more tension than the other two, it drags the tip toward its own stake. That shortens the distance to that stake and lengthens the distance to the other two, which makes that line slacker still and another one tighter. It feeds itself. There is no equilibrium for it to settle into.
The base is the other half of it. The Freedom Spike grips a few inches of the bottom section. That stops the mast sliding sideways, but it does very little to stop the mast rotating. That is close to a pin joint, and a 33 foot column standing on a pin joint is an inverted pendulum. Any lean is self reinforcing.
Put those together and you have an unstable system with three inputs and one operator. Balancing it is not a skill you practice your way into. It is a control problem one person cannot solve in real time, which is why every variation I tried produced the same result.
There is one more number worth knowing, because it explains why hauling harder made things worse. A guy anchored at radius R on a mast of height H pulls at an angle of arctan(R/H) off vertical. The closer that angle is to vertical, the more of your pull turns into downward compression instead of sideways correction.
| Anchor radius on a 33 ft mast | Angle off vertical | Compression added per unit of correction |
|---|---|---|
| 8 ft | 13.6 degrees | 4.1 to 1 |
| 16.5 ft (half the height) | 26.6 degrees | 2.0 to 1 |
| 25 ft (three quarters) | 37.1 degrees | 1.3 to 1 |
At an 8 foot radius you are adding roughly four times more compression than correction, and compression on a column that is already bowed makes the bow worse. Anchor radius is the single biggest lever in guying anything, and hardly anybody has as much room as the math would like.
GigaParts already knew
Here is the part that convinced me I was not simply failing at something other people manage fine.
GigaParts sells three different 33 foot Explorer masts. All three extend to 33 feet. All three collapse to 27 inches. All three have 18 sections. The height, the packed size and the section count never change.
| Mast | Tip OD | Base OD | Weight | GigaParts use case |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| POTA33 | 5/32 in | 1.3 in | 1.1 lb | Standard POTA |
| POTA33B | 11/32 in | 1.47 in | 1.43 lb | Middle tier |
| POTA33H | 9/16 in | 1.75 in | 2.1 lb | HD / Windy POTA |
The only thing that changes across that lineup is how thick it is.
Bending stiffness climbs very steeply with diameter. Going from the standard 5/32 inch tip to the 33B's 11/32 is a little over double the diameter, which works out to roughly an order of magnitude more resistance to bending. The 33H's 9/16 inch tip is a long way more again. GigaParts lists the standard model's primary use case as "Standard POTA" and the 33H's as "HD / Windy POTA."
Read that lineup backwards and it tells a story. Somebody shipped a very light 33 foot mast, people hung real antennas on it in real wind, and the fix was not a clever accessory. It was two progressively thicker versions of the same mast.
I was trying to solve with a printed ring what the manufacturer had already solved with more carbon fiber.
So I stopped
I pulled the POTA 33 from the Freedom Spike listing. No fitment line, no variant, no tags.
The sales data made that easy. Between May and September, the Freedom Spike sold 9 units for the POTA 20, 1 for the Lil Dude LD6, and zero for the POTA 33. Not a handful. Zero. I had 50 of them printed and sitting in a bin.
I would rather not sell a part than sell one that sets somebody up to snap a mast in a field somewhere.
If I come back to 33 foot masts it will be for the POTA33H, which is the one actually built for the job.
What I built instead
While all of this was going on, I was getting email. Not about the 33. About the 20.
One repeat customer in Colorado put it plainly: make a guy ring for the POTA 20, about four or five feet up from the ground. A week later he wrote back after re-guying a POTA 20 with a small end-fed feedpoint about 15 feet up. The mast slid up out of the Freedom Spike and the printed mount snapped in half instead of his pole.
That is a different problem than the 33, and it has a real answer. A 20 foot mast is short enough that securing the base is most of the battle, and the base is the one part of a telescoping mast that never moves while you extend it. You can set it at waist height, with the mast collapsed, completely under control, in about ten seconds.
So the Freedom Guy Kit is a POTA 20 kit. Four solid rings at four measured heights, plus eight tensioners.
| Ring | Height from the bottom of the mast | Job |
|---|---|---|
| POTA20-1 | 16 in | Secures the base. Spreads load off the spike so it is not a single point. |
| POTA20-2 | 5 ft | First anti-bend level. |
| POTA20-3 | 13 ft 4 in | Two thirds up. For heavier loads or wind. |
| POTA20-4 | The tip, 20 ft | Top guys, antenna hang point, or a halyard. |
A few choices in there are deliberate and worth explaining.
The rings are solid, not split. Everyone else sells a split ring that clips on after the mast is up. A split is a weak point under real guy tension. Solid rings go on as the mast goes up: drop one over the tip, it slides down and stops on its own at the joint whose diameter matches its bore. The bore sets the height. Nothing to latch, nothing to break.
No cord in the kit. That is on purpose. The whole premise is choice. Guy at one level or three, run three lines or four, use the cord you already carry. The rings and tensioners take up to 4mm, so standard 550 paracord fits, though I prefer something in the 2 to 3mm range. On thin cord, finish with a figure-eight stopper rather than a single overhand, because a single knot can pull through.
Printed in ASA. Most printed mast hardware out there is PETG or PLA+. Those soften in a hot car and go brittle in UV. ASA is the material you want for a part that lives outside.
Eight tensioners. Enough for two levels of three with spares, or two full levels of four. Almost nobody guys all four heights at once.
What mast are you running?
This is the part where I ask for something. I have one data point on which masts people actually use, and it is my own sales history, which only tells me about people who already found me.
If you run a telescoping mast for POTA, SOTA or GMRS, tell me which one. It takes ten seconds and it directly decides what I build next. I already know the POTA 20 is worth supporting. I do not know whether the Lil Dude, the POTA33H, the SOTAbeams Carbon 6 or something I have not heard of is next.
The gear
Both of these are for the GigaParts Explorer POTA 20.
- Freedom Guy Kit, four rings and eight tensioners, $14.99
- Freedom Spike Ground Mount Kit, the ground spike the mast stands in, $36.99
If you want the earlier half of this story, I wrote up what happened the first time I field-tested the Freedom Spike, including the part where it broke.
And if you are about to tell me that I should have just bought the heavy duty mast: yes. That is the conclusion. It only took a month of failing in a yard to get there.