The Mast Jerry Built: Remembering VE6AB

July 2026

Last September I posted something simple : “Admiring this @VE6AB mast rotator… Fine business!” — a trailer-hitch-mounted antenna rotator I’d found online, built by a ham in southeastern Alberta named Jerry Clements. I linked his own blog post about it and moved on with my day.

A little while later, a reply came in: “Yes Jerry had amazing content too bad he is a SK.”

SK. Silent Key. Gone.

I hadn’t known. I replied: “Oh man! Had no idea. Thanks for letting me know. That’s sad. I was hoping to meet him. Have to wait for heaven now for that. Time is short.”

I never got to meet Jerry, VE6AB. But I’ve been building on what he shared ever since, and I want to tell that story properly.

Who Jerry was

Jerry Clements ran a blog called Jerry’s Journal — ham radio, machine shop projects, cold-weather field operating, APRS, and wildlife photography, all mixed together the way a real hobby actually looks. His tagline was simple: “a sunrise is god’s way of saying… let’s start again.” He also kept a personal site (Wayback Machine archive — the live site is no longer online) with more of his projects and photography.

He operated a Max-Gain Systems MK-4-HD, a 25-foot heavy-duty fiberglass push-up mast, mounted on a trailer hitch with a tilt system that let him rotate the whole thing by hand. In rough conditions he’d retract the top sections to double or triple the wall thickness up high, trading reach for rigidity. He used it for SSB, contesting, signal testing, and emergency communications work across Alberta’s terrain — bluffs, mountains, frozen reservoirs in the dead of winter. His work made it into ARRL’s On The Air magazine in late 2020. Max-Gain Systems themselves featured him in a write-up on their own site about the best antenna mast for mobile operations — Jerry’s field work was good enough that the mast maker itself pointed to him as the example.

See Jerry at his mast, working 2m SSB off Highway 564 east of Calgary → (photo: Max-Gain Systems)

The specific post I’d found — the one that started all this — was from December 2021: how he’d worked out a way to get real 360-degree rotation out of a trailer-hitch mount, no expensive rotator required. That’s the kind of practical, share-it-freely engineering that makes this hobby what it is.

Building my own

My own mast has gone through a few generations. It started as concrete float poles from Lowe’s stuffed inside a bike-rack carrier — genuinely held together with “grease and persuasion,” as I put it at the time (video of that first setup in action ).

Eventually I moved up to a real Max Gain mast of my own, and I kept iterating on it the same way Jerry iterated on his.

The Elk antenna and mast sections, packed for the POTA activation below. Source post →

Winter Field Day 2026

That mast did real work this year. For Winter Field Day, our club, N4MZ (Baldwin County Amateur Radio Club), pushed hard on VHF and up — 220 MHz and 900 MHz stations that had been sitting in closets got dusted off across South Alabama, chasing a new 12-band bonus. My mast carried the load: a 6m omni, a 144/440 Elk log periodic, a 220 Yagi, a 900 MHz Yagi, and a 1.2 GHz loop Yagi, swapped in and out as the operating period moved through the bands.

The Max Gain mast up at the Winter Field Day 2026 campsite. Source post →

It worked. N4MZ finished 1st in Alabama out of 53 entries, and 13th nationally out of 2,537 in the 2026 Winter Field Day event. My own notes from that weekend summed up why it mattered less as a trophy and more as a reason: Winter Field Day gave a lot of us a real chance to just enjoy the hobby. One operator, caught on video near the end of the weekend, put it best: “I’m having a blast!”

Keeping it going

I’ve kept using that mast since — a POTA activation working ten stations on 2m SSB with an Elk antenna (video ), the Foley Tailgater’s talk-in frequency with a Comet GP1 (video ), more contacts logged than I can count.

All 10 contacts from that POTA activation — 2m SSB, not meteor scatter. Source post →

The one thing that still bugged me was not being able to operate with the tailgate down, so I recently switched to an extended bar mount from Max Gain — the same setup a friend, Jason (VE5REV), had already built. None of it required meeting Jerry in person. He put what he built out into the world, freely, and it kept working long after he was gone.

That’s really what keeping someone’s memory alive looks like in this hobby — not a plaque, but a mast still going up, still doing the job he designed it to do, one more contact at a time. 73, Jerry. I’ll see you in heaven.