When Jay Terleski, WX0B, called W2GD & described the repairs needed at his Texas home QTH, John immediately called me–the work was that involved. So that’s why & where we found ourselves this past week, doing the following:
Step One was to take down the damaged OptiBeam 80M rotary dipole. We’re getting pretty familiar with these OptiBeam repairs at this point. Jay must have experienced a fairly hefty wind surge of some sort, considering the bend in the element. The tricky part of ALL the work there in Texas was not having access to my truck–with the right tools for the job at hand. We managed to limp along through the kindess of K5RT, who loaned us some 3/16-inch EHS (for tramming) & some ropes. Unfortunately, neither were quite long enough, so we ended up splicing in slings & come alongs & so forth to get them to work. Once the 80M was on the ground, we climbed down to 120 feet to deal with the CAL-AV 40M Yagi, which was showing an intermittent. Unable to find it, we trammed the beam down. The following day found us over on the 100 foot self-supporting tower. It’s a homebrew (albeit commercial) tower, which has unconventional braces only on one side, making climbing (for me) awkward & pretty
uncomfortable. On this tower, the job was to low existing 10 & 15M beams, replace them with new models, & then sidemount new antennas lower down. Then we hauled the CAL-AV back in to position (the hairpin had somehow worked itself loose).
The next day, we trammed the repaired 80M OptiBeam back up. Despite the tool shortage, the high heat (it was 97 yesterday) & humidity, we persevered & managed to get everything done in the span of 33 billable hours. Not bad when our original estimate was for four work days.
Jay’s happy, the station is back up & running. A lunchbreak visit on Friday to the world headquarters of
Array Solutions was a brief respite from the hea!
Next up, local work, delivery to K7BV, & so forth…then Dayton!
stay tuned…
