Sept
21, 2002: TOWER DAY! (continued):
The antennas go up
N0RQ/KC5POV Tower Page 6
Sept
21, 2002:
TOWER DAY!
(continued):
The antennas go up
The 6m beam went up first. That's Mike W8CM on the tower and Dave N0RQ (me) in the basket. I don't like heights -- at all. I don't like roller coasters ("voluntary torture devices", I call them). Gravity and I have an agreement -- I stay on the ground, and it treats me right. I'm aware of the old saying, "The bigger they are, the harder they fall."
Going up in the man-basket was, shall we say, challenging... but I'm glad I did it! Mostly glad anyway. I didn't embarrass myself (well, not too much), and the man-basket was a very effective way to get the beams up.
The HF beam (Force 12 XR-5) weighs 55 pounds and has an 18 foot boom. Not
huge, obviously, but big enough.
It rested on the side of the man-basket, went up as pictured, and rotated into place on the mast. Force 12 has a nice easy-mount system, where you don't have to fiddle with U-bolts while hanging on to the antenna.
Yes, this increased crane rental time ($), but it worked great -- no ropes, no pulleys, no antenna elements banging into things, and hopefully easier for the person on the tower.
The elements rotated nicely around the crane, around the tower, and around Mike, and it was easily attached.
With a little help from below from K5EEN and WA5M -- getting the 2 beams lined up with each other -- and then pointing them at the pre-arranged marker due north, then tightening a few bolts on the rotor, and it was set.
Here is a close-up of the finished mast, HF beam, rotor (Yaesu G-1000DXA), and rotor loop
(LMR-400UF ultra-flex).
If the top of the tower legs look funny... the thrust bearing plate sits 6" below the top of the legs. Trylon said I could just cut the excess off, but that seemed pretty brutal. To avoid nasty scrapes in the future, I tied on some short round pieces of excess PVC. Crude. Cheap. Effective.
12 feet below the top of the tower (not shown) is the coax switch (5-position Ameritron
RCS-8V, fed with LMR-600) and a 10' PVC pipe (a 1" pipe inside a 1.25" pipe)
with a pulley at each end for hanging dipoles.