thanks to Mike, N8MTV and the Ellington and Photo team:
Final Hex Tower Work
KJ4QJW, N9RCS, KG5HOK, W5OC spent Saturday May 27, from 9AM-4PM finishing work making coax and control line connections and the guying down of the crank up tower. Using the in-place coax and rotor control wiring which runs from the tower base to inside the shack, Stu, KJ4QJW, terminated the connections at both end and discovered the “missing” connection lines behind the W5RRR service panel.
How Not to Climb a Tower
K5RG shared his wisdom about tower climbing, during our May 25 club meeting.
Ken brought in his full body harness and lanyards.
Updated status of Hex Beam build
Mike Vandewalle, N8MTV, offered a helpful hand to put the finishing touches onto the hexbeam project last nite 5/23.
The missing 15m directive and reflective wire element had finally arrived from KIO Technologies and it was carefully installed on the spiderweb-like antenna after the whole antenna was unmounted from the tower and brought back to ground level.
Hex beam @ W5RRR
Hex beam project getting real.
Mother’s Day was spent getting up a used K4KIO hex.
The good news: it unexpected included a 6m capability.
The bad news: it didn’t come with 15m wires.
A confessional
Gary, KE5AMW, is a CW guy. He’s gotten me interested to sharpen my CW skills that have rusted over the years.
I confess– he’s also inspired me to finally learn how to use a CW mechanical Bug, something I’ve put off for years. I bought this off of eBay a long time ago, but never learned how to key it.
W5RRR Crankup Tower
KG5HOK devised a cleverly simple u-bolt mounting scheme to get our temporary 50′ crackup tower up for operation.
It will live at the empty concrete slab until we can get the plans (and funds) in place to re-erect the 60′ full sized tower.
IC-781 update- Fixed (for a few weeks now)
Updating this Blog subject,…
IC-781 HF transceiver now working fine (fingers crossed) so we’re back to 3x HF radios in the shack.
Insidious R20 fusible resistor kept tricking us into thinking there was a downstream failure embedded in the power line supply.
Turns out that Icom engineers very cleverly designed this inline resistor just below the edge of it’s power handling capacity.
