Monthly Archive for September, 2009

Another “exciting” few days on the road, down in Texas. Where they do things large. First stop: N5CQ’s in Austin, where W2GD & I trammed down his 2L 80M M2 Yagi, repaired the obvious broken linear loading parts & trammed it back up, into place on his 200 ft tower.  Only to disctover it’s still not working correctly. We’ve mapped out various ways to repair things w/o removing it. Next time. Then, back over to Houston area, to NR5M’s once again. The order of business this time? A two stack of 9L 10M Yagis (60-ft booms) on new XG ring rotators. And finish construction of the 3L 80M M2 Yagi (this version using the original linear loading design, not the big coils, as in the first one we’d previously installed!). Of course, that meant a third XG ring rotator had to go up. The WX was cold and wet. Parts of the ranch turn into literal muck with moisture, so conditions were not ideal. Another Wal-Mart sweatshirt saved the day….
Finally, Saturday dawned bright and sunny (with no wind, amazingly enough) and George elected to use the ideal conditions to modify the original 80M Yagi, so I spent four hours in the man basket at 140 feet, extending the element tips, in stages, until we reached to VSWR and bandwidth plots we wanted. An additional eight inches turned out to be the magic number. Then I went back to each tip, drilled and bolted things together. The crane then moved to the back 185 ft tower and we literally lifted and dropped the new 3L 80M Yagi  into place in about five minutes! Biggest antenna we’ve ever put up, and also probably the fastest. Simply picked it up & laid it in the cradle. The crane had about 10-15 ft of pick left, making things easy. We were then surprised to find none of the bolts fit! So, spent an hour hanging on to the boom, holding things in place, while George ran out and bought bolts, only to discover the ring rotator had some mis-sized tabs welded in place, making things even more difficult. We managed to work our way around the problems (thank goodness for flat washers), but did not step off the tower until 8:30, in total darkness.

GD will be traveling with other jobs, so I’ll be back to Texas in October by myself. Next planned projects there include the M2 EME array, a 15M rotator repair, and 40M four square.

SC/NC & VA/MD trips up coming now….

stay tuned!

The day started smoothly enough. Local rental company (RSC) dropped off the 65-ft manlift @7AM, just as promised. I was at the jobsite by 8. Started right up & I moved it into position & had one 2M Yagi & the pair of 432 Yagis off one side of the H-frame by 8:30. Life was good. Then I reached out & turned the key to re-start the lift & come to earth. Nothing. Zip, zilch, zero…thinking it was operator error (this was, after all, a new JLG manlift–one I’d never run before), I managed to get the beams out of the way & tried again. Still nothing. Hmmmmmm…not wishing to spend the rest of the day up there, I called the rental house. Luckily, their repair guy was on another job literally just down the street. They called him & he called me. We ran through the start-up procedure.
I was correct on all steps. But still nothing. So…the repair guy talked me through the emergency lowering procedure & I eased on down to the ground. He showed up in about an hour, took one quick look, & assured me the lift was broken. He then got out his Fluke & discovered a dead short in the solenoid circuit. He spent another hour going over basically every wire/cable from the battery to the tip of the boom. He finally found a short at the boom transition point–right at the man-basket, where all the cables are bundled. He moved all the cables carefully & then simply tie-wrapped them so that the short was gone. Field expedient repair. We both laughed. But he assured me I could get back down using the emergency procedure again, if needed. Managed to finish the job, albeit two hours later than I had thought. Without further incident.

Like Rosanne Rosanna Danna used to say: “It’s always sumpin….~!”

Shelby Hamfest this weekend.

stay tuned