Thanks to Clayton KJ4RUS going up the tower along with ground crew Bob N2ESP, Pat AA0O and Ed NZ1Q, I have a wire antennas on the tower. Clayton climbed the tower to put a rope in the tower standoff’s pulley and the ground crew connected things so the antennas could be raised. The ends were tied off and it all seems to work well. The picture below is of a contact I made on FT8 showing the coverage of the antennas on 20 meters. This looks like a great pattern…
Posts published in “Antennas”
Overview of the parts involved in the tower build
I ran across a very good blog on building a station. This chap built it from soup to nuts including the room, adding A/C, generator, two contesting operating positions and more. There are many good ideas in his station building series. Look here for more.
As many of you know, I have a Zero-Five 43′ vertical that I–in concert with the Alpha 9500–managed to set on fire. My 43 foot antenna works OK on 80m (good worldwide DX) and even decent range on 160m, but I have a terrible VSWR on 80 and 160. My Palstar and Ten Tec 238 manual tuner can handle it even at 1500, but rather than have such terrible losses in my 150 feet of coax, I decided it would be a fun project to build a remote-switched coil setup…
After many years dealing with telecom (and using other people’s toning tools), I broke down and got a nice Fluke cable tester and tone tool. The tool is a Fluke Networks MT-8200-60A IntelliTone Pro 200 Kit . This started because I have to tone out a bunch of coax cables from the back of the house and I tend to do those things as time allows without anyone else around. The tester has an F connector on it so I can hook up an F connector to N female patch…
I wrote an article for QST that was published in the September 2012 issue. I was fortunate enough to win the QST Cover Award for that article. You can find a PDF of the article here:
I finally took the time to learn how to install connectors on Heliax LDF4-50A 1/2″ hardline. I have the Positive Stop right angle connectors as well as older style “solder the tip” connectors. I also have a CPT-L4ARC tool that hooks to my drill. The automatic stripping tool ended up being the most trouble to learn the right way to use that. I learned that the solder connectors are not going to be the easiest ones to use in the field, but they do make a nice joint. The secret…