Unashamed luxury! I’ve used a jiffy bag a few times, trouble is it’s a two-man job.
I’ll look at this tomorrow, it should make more sense now……
Hopefully.
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Reminds me of a sail boat race and peeing off the fan tail. Everyone knows what you’re doing and y’all are going slow together.
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With respect to antennas, for starters you’ll need to know, for the track you’re building, how many radios the TOE calls for.
For example, if the track is a battery FDC track for a Mech Artillery Battalion, it would be equipped with two AN VRC 46 radios. The antennas would be the AS-1729/VRC, with the MX-6707 Base Matching unit.
I can’t speak to EVERY FDC track, but mine had the two RT units mounted on the shelves on the LEFT side of the vehicle. There are plates covering the six available openings for antennas on the top of the roof. While any of these could be used, the easiest thing to do is mount the two radios on the shelf on the left side toward the rear of the track, and then place the antenna mounts on the two rearmost positions on the left side as well, closest to the radios they are for.
A quick check of my M109A1 equipped DS battalion shows that each of the three battery FDCs were equipped with the same configuration.
In addition to those three tracks, the HHB had 7 more M577s. There was a “Brigade Liaison” track, which would be sent to the TOC of the maneuver Brigade we were in Direct Support of, as well as three “Battalion Liaison” tracks which would go to TOCs of the three Battalions.
In the 1970s this was very problematic for our battalion which had the mission to Support 2nd Brigade of the 8th ID, which at the time had FIVE battalions, three Mech Infantry and two Armor.
Not to worry though. We NEVER had enough people assigned to send to all these units anyway, so not having tracks was the LEAST of the problem. Regardless, all four of these tracks had the same two radio set up.
Finally at battalion our “TOC” consisted of three M577s, the S2/S3 track, and two Battalion FDC tracks. And again all three of these had the same two radio set up.
As you can see the M577 has the positions for six antennas and I’m sure that there were some unit TOEs which called for more than two radios, so if you’re building a specific track, check your references.
Given that a maneuver unit (Brigade/Battalion) nominally had three subordinate units, it would make sense that these tracks might be equipped with three (or more) radios.
But for a Field Artillery unit, I’d go with two.
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(I may have overdone it a bit)
Hi Tom, what a superb response! That was wonderfully informative and will help alot. Unfortunately with my “goof with the roof” I can only access the track from the ramp, so interior detail, radios etc will be limited.
Re James’ pic of his track it looks like the antennae are similar size to the brass a/m ones I mounted on previous builds - or am I mistaken?
I’ll definitely go with two mounts though as you suggest.
Thanks again for a great response.
ETA Just checked out the AS-1727 and apart from scratching 2 latching units, we should be good.
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Yes, thin brass rod, been using it for decades. The bases on that particular 577 are from Live Resin. The problem I think we’ve all had for many years was a lack of good, detailed antenna bases for damn near everything out there for all subjects, especially bent antenna bases. There’s a lot out there now from various manufacturers and I plan on buying tons, starting with my modern American vehicles and working my way backward in time, replacing them all with good, detailed bases. If you want to be crazy detailed there are people making actual two part AS-1729 antennas which is crazy, lol, but they are more realistic than a one part antenna, I’m happy with my one part 
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I bought some two-part antennas awhile back, so I’ll check those out. Bought some bent base units too but havent tried them out yet either. I’d like to do tied-down antennas one day.
I saw a pic of an M577 with a big, centrally located antenna with lots of bracing wires coming off it and another with 2 big aerials that looked like big X’s. The last one would be a challenge one day!
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The OE-254 Antenna, set those up countless times. If you look at the pic of mine, there are two mounting lugs of sorts just to the right of the drivers hatch, that’s where the 254 would be mounted. The lugs on the opposite side of the vehicle were for the curved winch, the one laying on the roof, to move the generator
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Interesting. I noticed you replaced the kit lugs with drilled-out lugs for the aerial and davit arm.
Nice work!
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Thanks! I just drilled out the mounts that were already there
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My FDC had 4 radios, the 254 is the long range antenna, so you would still have 4 stick antennas on the roof. We would switch the cable if we needed one radio on the 254. The 254 could mount in those brackets or on the ground.
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Some useful info on that site. Your info on antennas really helps though.
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The brackets behind the driver’s hatch? No, I guess you mean one of the roof-mounted positions.
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We also had an RC 292 which we would connect to one of the radios if we were having problems with range. And just like the picture shows, if we were NOT planning to stay in an improved position for long, we would mount the antenna in the brackets behind the driver’s hatch.
Because of concerns with counter battery fire and target location (i.e. US!) we would occasionally mount the antenna into the ground some distance away from the track so enemy radio direction finders could not ACCURATELY plot our location. But that was just a pain.
Interestingly, and I can’t swear that this is absolutely true, but we were told that parking and setting up in pine forests ( and there sure are a TON of them in Germany) could cause radio problems. The reasoning was the the pine needles acted very much like “chaff” because their length was compatible with the wave length of the frequencies used by the VRC series radios, and could “scatter” the radio waves in effect and cause interference and loss of range.
I will not swear this is true, but for sure we seemed to get better range when we were set up in the open like at a firing point, than we did on FTXs.
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Very much a problem. Verlinden used to make good radios and antenna bases, but as you mentioned, the mounting bases were vertical.
A lot of the vehicles bent the antenna which had a spring mounted at the base, and tied them down to lower the height, usually when in convoy.
That is a lot more difficult to depict!
Because I do a lot of scratch building, I have just about any size square, flat and round Evergreen Styrene you can think of and I’ll use one of the lengths of plastic rod since I have a ton of that.
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I’m no expert at all, but I would think trees in general were blocking the radios as opposed to pine needles. 
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Some people are even making the antenna balls, something you need from at least the 80’s on. Two things would deadline your tank in regards to radios, no antenna ball and no safety wire securing the antenna to the base. I make my balls from white glue, it’s very hit and miss, and most come out like crap
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There are quite a few good options out there now with either resin antenna bases form the likes of Djiti and others. The Djiti ones are really nice and you get a bunch of straight and bent ones in each set. I have a couple sets of them and it is enough for a bunch of vehicles.
There are 3d printed options now too.
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Yes, love them! There’s sets for SINCGARS out there too. Probably this fall gonna dump some money into a bunch of these
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