Or, to be more specific, back home again. Off the road, as it were…
W2GD & I spent two weeks traveling, doing tower work. Here’s a brief recap:
First, flew down to Houston, headed to the NR5M radio ranch, where we loaded up on tools & gear, then headed to Austin. We were going to take down (again) & finalize the repairs needed on N5CQ’s 2L 80M Yagi. We had taken it down on a previous trip, but there wasn’t a suitable hunk of coax available to test with before hauling it back up to 200 feet! This time, I’d prepared a hunk of RG-8X just for testing & shipped it to Austin. We were surprised to find 12 feet of the reflector tip missing upon arrival, so the beam would needed to have been taken down anyway. I climbed up & installed the EHS tram line, while John did the ground prep. Things were going great until the last (of four) U-bolts. I simply could not hold the Yagi in place with one hand, & remove that U-bolt with the other! So…we spent some considerable time with the beam twisting in the wind & me straining mightily to move the 250 lb beast enough to allow that bolt to come out. In the process, the Yagi slid vertical, then upside down! No amount of cursing, prayer, or muscle power would help. High winds & heavy rain squalls did NOT help! So, I secured it with some slings & we left it hanging on the tower side overnight. We decided to take it down in this upside-down configuration, & that worked just fine. We removed, turned, & rotated the elements once on the ground, & made the needed repairs. The main feedline was defective—the primary problem all along. Tramming the antenna back up went well, & w/both of us atop the tower, we had it bolted into position in no time. A tighter tramline this time allowed us to easily clear the guys. We headed back to Hempstead.
At NR5M, the worklist was long & involved. We began w/changing the 10M stack tower (140 ft of 45G) to a star-guyed tower, installing our “standard” K0XG hardware right below the existing orbital ring rotators. The topmost 10M Yagi was on a mast, on a PVRC-mount, so there we had to install both the star-guy bracket & an orbital ring. Once they were in place, we shifted that top 10M Yagi down, on to the rotator, removed the mast, and then hauled up 18-ft of solid, two inch fiberglas rod to replace the mast. The antenna then going on the mast (a 2M X-beam) was trammed up & into place. The rain we’d encountered over in Austin continued to plague us in Hempstead, along with unusual high winds out of the NW, opposite what we usually experience there. Moving from the 10M stack tower to the 15M stack tower, we took down the existing 2M beam (stored it carefully atop the 15M beam elements), & then trammed up the pre-made 1296 & 432 stacked Yagis, carefully storing them on the 15M beam elements. By this point, it was impossible to stand, let alone work, at the tower top, w/o impaling yourself on an aluminum rod, or cutting some portion of your anatomy or clothing on the hardware. We then hauled out the 12-ft mast, moved the rotator down lower in the tower, & installed a 24-ft mast! Then began the arduous task of stacking the various beams on to the mast (carefully pre-labeled), moving it up inside the bearing, securing it, then repeating the process. Installing the phasing lines & duplexers, along w/the required weather-proofing of every connection, slowed this process to a crawl. It took us two 11-hour days to accomplish everything, with nine of each of those days atop the tower. Other trivial tasks? Building new chain drives for up-grading the transmission speed of an XG-ring rotator, trouble-shooting the top 80M beam rotator. fixing the TIC rings on the 15M stack tower, & considering what might be slowing the lower 40M stack Yagi down….
Then it was time to fly to Oklahoma, where K5KC’s 2L 80M Yagi awaited our attention. The weather was actually worse: higher winds, & then rain. But I climbed Ken’s 200-ft 55G tower & rigged the line to lower the Opti-Beam. It turned out to probably have had the boom-to-mast plate installed incorrectly, & was critically unbalanced. Luckily, we had a tag line, which I was able to secure to one side, & with some careful juggling, we manged to get it past the topmost guy & trammed down. We configured it as a simple dipole, installed a new relay set, & trammed it back up the next day, with W2GD climbing that day. Then it was time for a collective sigh of relief, packing, & flying back to Houston, where we boarded separate flights for home….
Next up? Staying close to home while the XYL recovers from back surgery. Local gigs, including some video production work (I think I recall which buttons to push on the camera…).
Then, back on the road, to MO, IL, TN, et cetera.
stay tuned
