Category Archives: QTH - Page 2

Indoor station tour @SJ2W

I shot some videos of an indoor station tour of SJ2W just before the CQWW DX CW 2011 contest. The videos are not the best quality and unscripted, so keep that in mind and enjoy the tour.


Radio shack tour


Antenna switch room


openASC driver boards @SJ2W


Some amplifiers at SJ2W

40m yagi fixed

I got a call on Thursday from SM2LIY who was at the QTH and said that the 40m yagi had tilted 90 degrees. This made me very depressed and I called SM2XJP so he could go out there and check if everything seem to be ok and it was just a matter of “twisting” it back and tighten the clamps. He called back a few hours later and confirmed that everything looked OK which made me a bit more calm.

I arrived at the QTH on Friday when it was dark, so I could not see the mess myself and started to do other work instead. I had gone to SM2EKM and picked up the SB220 he borrowed me to use on the 2nd radio during CQWW SSB that I plan to do SOAB HP as SJ2W. When I connected the amp and started it up it did blow the fuse and the anode current meter getting floored. This made me very scared but I was confused since I had handled the amp with care. So I checked to see if the tubes were properly in the sockets since I suspected maybe some glitch making it not “cut off”. I moved the tubes a bit and started it again and the amp was running, so I thought the problem was solved. Until I stepped upp from the chair which apparently made the table move slightly and bang the fuse went again. This made me very confused and I started to look at the tubes and did notice that the anode in the tube was lose and at some angles it did hit the cathode creating a shortcut. This made me very upset thinking I broke the tube so now I was not just nervous to climb the tower on Saturday morning but also the call to SM2EKM to tell him I broke his amp.

On Saturday morning I had a hard time eating anything because I was really nervous for the tower climb, for some strange reason since I’ve done it many times before without problems. I just had one of those days where I didn’t feel like doing it but I did pull myself together and climbed the tower mid day on Saturday. It went pretty easy but I avoided looking up since I could see some ice in the tower at some points, like where antennas were attached to the tower. However nothing fell and after I climbed up I broke the ice loose and threw it down, so that it wouldn’t hit me on my way down. Well in the top of the tower everything went very smoothly. I loosened the clamps more and with help of the boom support I could turn the yagi back. However the elements look worse aligned than compared to when we put the beam up, so I am afraid that it might twist even more this winter but hopefully it will survive as long as possible and we can fix it in the spring/summer.

When this was finished and I had gotten down to the ground again I called SM2EKM and told him what happened and he said “But Mikey, you should know that I have lots of tubes” so he will send two new tubes with me down to replace the ones in the amp now. So I had been nervous over nothing, both when it came to the tower climb as well as the call to SM2EKM 🙂 Thanks Jim!

After this was done SM2XJP and I did some work down at where the 40m 4-SQ will be placed but after a few hours we pretty much gave up. The snow makes it too hard and we don’t really have time to do everything to get the 4-SQ up before the ground will get rock hard and even getting rid of all the trees and branches is a big job. So this will need to wait until the spring/summer to be done. I am considering putting up a loop with apex @18m vertically polarized as EU antenna for 40 to use when beaming some other direction with the beam.

Here are some pictures taken by gf Anna!

Tower work

Today SM2XJP came over to assist me a bit while I took down the tram wire from the tower, making it possible for us to rotate the whole beauty. It went pretty smoothly even though it started to rain and got a little windy when I got up to 61m. I took some pictures showing different directions from the top and I think the takeoff looks good, pretty much similar to a flat QTH and to some directions even better.

The horizon

When I made the trip up to 37m to take down the cable from the top light I took some pictures of the takeoff to most directions. I will try to update these later with pictures from 60m.

View down from 36m

Another view down

The 10m stack

View towards VK

View towards South East

View towards South (EU  & Africa)

View towards South West (UK, South America)

View towards west (Central America, North America)

View towards Alaska

View straight North

View straight Japan