SJ2W Contest Station

Yesterday I decided to remove the rotor of the big 60m tower. This is because it is currently not strong enough, it has got some cracked weld and also I found a big crack in the metal when I removed the gearbox. This is however rather easily fixed and I will add some more iron to it so that it gets more stiff and doesn’t flex so much.

When SM2XJP arrived I decided to climb the tower (I don’t climb it when I am here alone) to add the boom side support for the 20m yagi and tighten some stuff up on the 40m yagi. I also needed to attach the cables properly to the tower. I use duct tape every 50-100cm or so on cables running in the tower, to avoid them from bashing against it when its windy. When I arrived up to the top 20m yagi the boom support was missing its clamps, so I could not do that. However I finished up the coaxes and on the way down with help of SM2XJP on the ground we lowered the 20m temporary 3el yagi @20m and also the low 15m yagi which will be moved up to 17m when the top 15m yagi (27m) and low 20m yagi (23m) is in place.

I also have fixed the cables between the 7/8″ in the tower and the 7/8″ on the ground. I used 3 pcs of RG-217 for this with 7/16″ connectors. I also put the RG-17 for the 160m vert, 80m 4-SQ and 40m 4-SQ in the ground and routed them into the switching room together with the other coaxes.

Today it was rainy so I decided to build the verticals for the 40m 4-SQ. The tips were made out of an old ZX 15m monobander and I added some 31 and 35mm tubing to that plus put 12mm tips (tip of the ZX yagi was 15mm). This turned out great and hopefully I will be able to have them un-guyed since they stand rather well protected with forest all around.

Here are some pictures

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The current big project at the station is to get the 3el fullsize 40m yagi up at around 60m in the big tower. This will be done during the week with help from SM3SGP. Since its hard to hoist one of these and clear the guy lines we will build the beam up in the tower. So first we hoist the boom, then the reflector/director and last the driven element. SM3SGP has done this before at his QTH (SK3W) with success.

I made a brief trip to the work QTH where I during a few hours made 6 pcs of boom to mast plates, 4 pcs of driven element plates and a lot of isolators for the two 15m yagis and the last 20m yagi. So now I have pretty much all pieces to get all antennas in the 60m tower completed except the 2nd 40m yagi, which will probably be done next summer because of some material shortage.

Here are some pictures,

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Posted under Uncategorized, Work weekend

I started to put together the third 20m yagi today. After some heavy snow this winter I will also need to replace some parts of the 20m yagi lying out in the field which wasn’t put up before the snow came. I also did some work on the lathe today making some tubes fit better. The 19mm and 12mm tubes doesn’t fit properly into the 22 and 15mm tubes, and instead of grinding the mm away I decided to use the lathe at work instead.

I also had to make distance rings between the 31 and 25mm tubing, which was made out of some piece of 28mm tube I found and milled a few tenth of a mm on both the inside and outside to make it fit. Not the most fun work but it needs to be done.

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This weekend was spent at the QTH with gf and SM3JLA joining on Saturday at 0100 or so. He was gonna operate a bit in the WPX SSB contest and worked some 1200q before we went down to fix an amplifier. This took us several hours to trying to find the problem. It is an old auto-tune amplifier with a 4cx1500b tube which was built in the late 60s. It took us some time to understand how it worked and finally after several attempts we had found all problems. What started out with a broken relay went over to a broken soldering joint on the relay socket and then to another relay which was also bad. Finally we had it working and 1kW output on all bands and we also have good understanding now how the amp operates. The result was accomplished at around 02:00 on Monday morning so we started the sauna and did some celebration with a beer or two.

I also bought a new saw to be used when doing some carpentry and built a stand for it from and old table. However I need to make the foots of it a bit longer to make it more stable. We also moved some 19″ racks around the barn since they had been in the way. I installed a new camera as well in the shack so now it takes snapshots each minute and when there is movement it records it at smaller intervals. It has got night vision as well and pretty good picture quality. It is an IP-400 camera bought from www.dealextreme.com

I did also shovel a lot of snow with help from the gf. When we arrived we had to shovel away some 20-30cm of snow and during the weekend we probably shoveled as much again. The snow depth is now 105cm and this amount of snow I can’t remember that I have ever experienced. Might be the winter 86/87 but then I was 5 years old and my references are a bit off. The neighbor came by and helped to take away some snow with the tractor too, which is very kind of him. He doesn’t like all cables though that are temporarily installed, so next year he won’t have that problem when the switch room is moved to the barn.

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