Then back to Lyman, SC, to hopefully finish W4TUN’s install. Got the trench dug from house to tower base, all the Heliax connectors installed, & things in the ground, the ground system finalized, & the Heliax up, on the tower, but still not quite finished. Came off tower in the dark. Still to go: fill in trench, install the rotator control cable to GH box, after hooking up PolyPhaswer, run copper strap to ground system, & test everything. That’s set for next week, before heading off to Ohio.

stay tuned…

Due to their size, we suggested the simplest & safest approach was to use a crane, but we began working on Monday morning (temps in the teens!), by tramming down four of the broken beams by hand. Tuesday we managed to get the broken 80M beam down. Wednesday we shifted out attention to the mis-aligned 160M four square array, correcting that. Thursday, the crane showed up, but was unable to make the turn in the drive on to the property. Finally, after a lot of work with the bucket & blade on Ken’s tractor, they were able to turn sharply enough to get on the property. Once the crane was set, we made short work on taking down the remaining 30M & 40M Yagis.

Thursday night was a total treat, as we drove over & met with K3LR. Terrific conversations & stories over dinner at the Edmond country club. Definitely a swell time.

Friday found us installing the newly-made Phillystran supports for the 160M array, which plumbed it up properly. We bought Ken lunch & headed for the airport, knowing full well that the predicted snowstorm in Chicago would probably cause havoc with our schedules. And it did. John got bumped to Detroit, & then eastward to LaGuardia (although his car was parked at Newark airport), while I was shifted to Houston. My arrival shifted back by two hours, & ‘GD got home around 2:30, with his son driving him back over to Newark airport.

Oh the life of the itinerant tower worker.

stay tuned…

Of course, the only solution was to cut down some trees, which had been growing there for the past 19 years. Which Joe did. But not enough, or not as many as he should have, as W2GD & I discovered when we got there. A quick phone call brought the tree company back, & they began removing the offending over-hanging branches. In the meantime, we were beginning the painful process of dis-assembling the old 4L KLM 40M Yagi atop the tower. Since one element was already broken, balance issues became even more critical. Temperatures slightly above 40 degrees made things somewhat easier. 10-15 MPH steady winds hindered things. But over two days, we managed to remove elements from both the 40M beam, along with the KT-36XA, & lower them to the ground. The third day dawned with even milder temps & even lower winds, very helpful in getting the new beam into position.

I intended to simply remove two of the lower guy sets & pull the beam straight up alongside the tower (55G). Then the plan was to install temporary guys & jump over the removed top guy set.
But the boom was too long & the guy angle too severe, making temp guys useless for all practical purposes, so we were forced to simply remove two of the top guy sets & repeat the process, pulling the beam out & away from the tower as we worked it upward.

With lots of tugging & pulling, we managed to get the beam (which weighs 300 lbs) above the top guy bracket, re-installed the guy sets, & then climbed up. Once there, the trusty Lug-ALL comealong allowed us to get the beam atop the tower’s top plate. Then it was the usual juggling act required to install the muffler clamp sets. (I’m leaving out all the problem-solving required to make OptiBeam’s 12-inch square boom-to-mast plate pre-drilled for 2-inch material fit on to the 3-inch diameter, climbing-step-with-10-inch-spacing-equipped mast….)

We came off the tower at 6PM in total darkness. When I went back the following morning to load up the truck, Joe was very depressed–the new beam was dead. I climbed up & discovered I’d installed the feedline jumper in the wrong place on the DXE switchbox. Of course, I’d done that by feel, rather than being able to see what I was doing. Once corrected, everything worked just fine.

A long drive home, but satisfied, et cetera.

stay tuned…

He did manage to take this photo as we first started the process. I had just removed the cover on a small Hoffman box containing a DXE switch, to find a baseball-sized wasp’s nest, complete w/critters. Since it was still only 40-degrees, not a creature was stirring, as some of you may recall hearing just a few short days ago. The spray can made short work of the ones left behind…

HNY to the many readers of this blog in 2012.

stay tuned…

The previous two weeks were noteworthy because of the amount of detailed traffic flowing from fellows who know propagation–describing that old who/what/when/where of suggested times & paths. None of that happened. No exotic DX was worked; no unusual paths were noted. But I had fun, & a fair amount of it.

Right at the start, it was obvious 10M was NOT the same 10M we had experienced in CQWW, just a few weeks prior. Signals were just flat–there were none of those rock-solid, thumping in the headsets, get you excited stations calling in. Nor was the rate great. But again, I was happy to be in the driver’s seat & an F1 jockey. (Okay, I admit, I was an ENTER jockey this time out. I was using N1MM for the first time ever, thanks to W0YR, who explained the program to me Friday afternoon, especially the ESM format, which I used. I can honestly say I liked everything about it, BUT the editing feature! I’m not interested in using a mouse during a contest. And if one makes a mistake, either in copying or typing, that’s what’s required. That took some getting used to. But again, overall, I was mostly impressed. Oh yes…the fonts on-screen could all be larger for these aging eyes. That’s probably a simple keystroke, but I didn’t/couldn’t find it, & looked over the tops of my old fart glasses most of the weekend.)

The other feature handicapping a single op at Jack’s QTH is the lack of a bathroom. I had some sort of weird stomach ache Sunday that required me to go to the house four times. Obviously, one loses one’s run frequency during this timeout. Plus the actual time lost. So my overall rate suffered. Again, I was having fun, so I just kept plugging away.

The final tally: 1698 & 153 mults. I missed MS
& AR, got all the Canadians, save the VOs. Plenty of JAs made it into the log. Nothing past the mercator in EU during the run. Almost nothing from Africa, save ZS. The usual LU count was way down. I worked seven of the new XE mults.

Again, I had fun. Thanks to K4VV for letting me drive & W0YR for helping explain the logging program.

A quick trip to Culpeper tomorrow, where once again, we’re trying to overcome problems w/his damn Prosistel, that I thought was fixed & re-installed last Friday!

stay tuned…

Anyhow, we are awaiting word from K9CT. And the new orbital ring rotator from K0XG for the K3CR station, hopefully here before truly bad weather sets in. And material to fabricate the new rotator shelf for the Montgomery County (PA) Allied tower, as well.

stay tuned…

TIC is supposedly offering new, improved motors. But we convinced Jim that installing the K0XG orbital ring rotator is probably a much safer & better idea. Now the only thing is to wait for delivery of same.

Headed West, stopping off to visit my Mother, in Killbuck, Ohio. Managed to scoot up to W8AV’s place, where I’d been trying to get to (without costing a small fortune in travel fees) for several months. The work I was supposed to do had been done, but he had two other jobs:
another TIC Ring failure (!) & replacing his T2X rotator. I got those done in short order. Then, headed South the following morning, with a brief stopover in Athens to visit old friend David Prince. Then finally on the road to Charlotte Monday evening. Raining the entire length of Ohio, West Virginia, & Virginia, finally stopping just North of the VA/NC line. Got home between 1-2AM.

Spent today gathering up pieces/parts needed for up-coming trip to MD/VA work after the CQ WW CW contest. Conditions predicted to be super.

stay tuned..

Meaning, we finally got to the Montgomery County PA EOC tower site, where we’d arranged with Doug, W3CF, to finalize their HF Yagi installation. They have 100 feet of ALLIED tower (self-supporting, like Rohn SSV), which was erected without a top plate–apparently mostly to hold a collection of Station Masters every 20 feet up the siderails. But the boys have wanted a Yagi up there since day one, so I agreed to fabricate a top plate & rotator shelf, to make the tower more “ham antenna friendly,” so to speak. It took three months to get the engineering drawings delivered (you know how gov’t billing can be). Then there was a bit of a wait until I had other material to take to the galvanizing plant, & so on. Everything went fine (including lifting that top plate, 1/4-inch steel, almost 4 feet diameter!), with all 12 holes aligning perfectly. But the rotator shelf….another story.
The drawings did not show that the tower’s X-bracing “swapped sides,” as they install one piece inside, one piece outside. Having made a shelf that’s just like Rohn, my angle bracing (designed to simply bolt onto the tower legs), would not fit. But being hams, & being prone to problem-solving, we put up the mast & used the existing mast-mount for the T2X on top of it. A short stub of pipe went in the T2X & we shortly had the TH-7 on top of that. Not exactly pretty, not exactly robust enough for years of trouble free service, but they’re on the air with the Yagi.

We made it all work, & with about 10 minutes of daylight left, too. I’ll be building a new accessory shelf to accomodate the X-bracing when I get home, then another trip back up to install everything “the right way,” of course.

Next job? We travel back to State College to figure out how/why the TIC Ring rotator on the newly-installed 40M OWA has stopped working.

stay tuned…

Monday morning I picked up a new 2L SteppIR from a Silent Key estate for a NC client, then headed to Potomac, MD to do a site survey for WA3WFA, then headed to W4CYS, thinking I’d get to install his newly-repotted Prosistel. Alas, the Green Heron controller seemed to have been zapped by a transient, so that is off to GH for repair. Tuesday found me back at W0ID’s, where we hoped to re-install his 40M Yagi driven element. But the crane companies had other ideas. Managed to stumble around doing odd-jobs (refurbishing an old WARC band dipole & installing it, etc.), do the crankup tower repairs the old fashioned way (I hate climbing crank ups!). We had the crane scheduled for Thursday, but the dispatcher apparently “forgot” to enter us in the daily schedule, so I was finally happy when we got one today–Friday. The element replacement went okay, but by the time I was ready to try leveling the beam (it needs to move lower about 3-4 inches probably, to get the boom perfectly plumb), the wind had picked up to a steady 30MPH, & even the crane operator suggested maybe I should come down. The man-basket was moving at least 8-10 feet in the wind, causing the chrome-moly mast to bend considerably–pretty nerve wracking or sphincter-tightening time since I had the basket tethered TO the mast! So I came down to the lower 20M Yagi & installed the torque compensator, then to the ground. Considering the wind & rain, I was pretty happy & Dick said he was okay with everything.

Finally home tonight, catching up as usual; work is piled up from the recent weather-related delays.

Conditions for CQ WW CW in a couple weeks are predicted to be good also, Hurray, it’s great to finally reap some benefits from the sunspots, at long last.

stay tuned…

Plans to do other work were rained out that evening in another downpour, so simply headed home to Charlotte.

Spoke w/GD again this morning (he flew into CLT on his way to VP5, for repairs there), just about the time I got home!

STILL raining here in Charlotte….more delays.

stay tuned…