Some quickie notes on recent work:
Saturday Joe and I stopped by KJ4ZM’s, to take down his old, partially-working TH-6, and put up his newly-purchased (from pal W4DEE) Tennadyne T-11. Sam had some friends over to watch the operation, and I must admit, I’ve never answered so many questions in my life about the whole process of tramming. Which is perhaps understandable, since not everyone is familiar with the operation, and most folks do not have the somewhat specialized tools I use to make the work easier. That includes a variety of ropes, my usual assortment of climbing gear (carabiners, pulleys, slings, and so forth), plus 50 years of experience. We managed to get the old beam, laying it in Sam’s driveway, then we pulled up the Tennadyne. The LPs are always difficult to tram up, because they are incredibly unbalanced beams (we probably added about 20+ lbs to the reflector side to get it flying anywhere close to level. But everyone was impressed, and we were done and gone in two hours!
Sunday we made it back up to W4TJE’s Fancy Gap QTH, to hopefully figure out why his top 15M Yagi had suddenly developed a high VSWR. A quick check showed it did resonate about 25mHz, so that pointed to only part of the driven element being connected. And sure enough, once I got up top, slung the beam up and tilted it down to Joe about 10-ft below me, the feedpoint connection on one side of the hairpin was showing no connection. I suspect it was really an issue of the original hardware which Force-12 supplied, which was always non-stainless. We cleaned everything up, I pulled the beam back up and in to place and voila…the VSWR was right back where it was two months ago when we re-installed it with a new balun. A quick hour’s worth of work.
Tomorrow, down to Lyman, SC, to put up W4TUN’s new 2M Yagi, along with installing his new 160M vertical.
stay tuned…
