Check the video for a small demo,

I don’t know at all if the top tube will survive high wind. We saw last year on our tube which was even longer (14m) that it survived the winds pretty well except that the long guy wires were more creating trouble than actually helping the tube. Unfortunately that tube broke because of a bad joint between two 60mm tubes, which was made way too weak. It was taken from some old vertical and I did not check how well that joint was made, apparently a mistake. So I though that if an element survives on a 40m yagi which is higher up and with also horizontal load it should be possible to hold also as a vertical. But I might be thinking all wrong and it might snap.

So SM2LIY came up with the idea of attaching a cable from the top of the top tower section and in case of failure of the top tube we can just pull that line out and attach it in a tree and we have an INV L. This is just done as a backup plan if something happens in the winter.

I hope I never need to climb that tower again, because its very scary when it moves around so much, so lets keep our fingers crossed that our thinking has been correct.

So left to do when it comes to antenna work for the autumn is to put up the low 6el for 15m to make it a 6/6 stack and to put up the 4-SQ for 40m. So the late autumn and beginning of the winter will probably be spent on making room for the 40m rotatable tower, I doubt we will have it up this year but we will try to make as much as possible done so we can put it up early next year.

I also hooked up the control cables for the BPFs to the openASC box so now the station is almost ready for serious contesting! I took some pictures as well of how it looks now, the SO2R position at least.

Tnx to SE2T, SM2LIY and SM2XJP for the help during the weekend!

[View with PicLens]

The first tests of the system shows quite a lot of signal improvement to some stations. Beaming EU for example some guys were 15dB louder on a higher angle compared to all antennas in phase. When we tried some towards US most of the time 6 degrees was the best but when band opened up more 13 degrees sometimes worked better. So I believe that during really good openings the higher angle might be useful while towards west coast I believe that 6 degrees will be better almost all the time.

Here are some pictures and also a video from the tower

[View with PicLens]

The antennas are stacked at 55/39/23m

Here are some pictures of the complete system,

[View with PicLens]

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

[View with PicLens]

Now I am putting together some tubing for the 40m 4-SQ which I have planned to have up before the winter. Also some work on getting the top 15m yagi ready to be lifted.

[View with PicLens]

PA3DAT arrived at the station while I was up in the 18m tower putting the rotator in the tower. He stayed with his wide during the whole day and evening until the next morning. It was a very pleasant visit and they are welcome back anytime! He was hoping to help out with the 40m yagi but unfortunately it was too windy. However it was just as windy today when we decided to continue with the work anyway.

I will post more information later, too tired now.

BIG thanks to especially SM3SGP but also SM2XLL and SM3JLA for helping out during the weekend!

Check the pictures below of the newly put up 3el yagi @60m height!

[View with PicLens]

12►

But first we needed to level everything out and hoist the beam for some tuning. We had a pretty good result at the first hoist but we did some minor changes and got it to resonate with a 1.2:1 VSWR where we wanted it. However since the beam was probably still affected by the ground we might need to do some fine tuning in the tower when the beam is in place.

Now we are waiting for some calmer weather so that we can start the process of building the yagi in the tower, right now its too windy.

[View with PicLens]

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,

[View with PicLens]

The tuning process went very smoothly since we knew the tip length from the top Yagi and we just had to move the hairpin bar slightly and it was perfect tuned at 14175 MHz, mid band. So when this was done we did screw in 2 screws in each tip just to insure that except the clamps it would really not be a problem in the future of it starting to move. The beam was now ready to be lifted but we got interrupted by some heavy rain which made everything wet and when it got warm again it was a lot of fog.

We tilted the beam and hoisted it up to its intended position and it was time for me to climb up to the tower. I took it pretty slow to get up there so that I would not lose too much energy on the climb and took 0.5l of water with me, which was not nearly enough since I ended up spending four hours up there until 00:00 local time. It was warm and nice though up in the tower, they had it a lot worse down on the ground since the damp grass and fog made it cold. I did not understand why everybody was putting on jackets etc but when I got down to about 20m I realized why. It is a bit tricky to handle such a large Yagi (18m boom = 60 feet) but with a bit thinking it got solved and positioned properly. It took a bit time to add the side support for the boom, but I wanted to get it done at once so that I would not need to climb the tower later for such an “simple” task.

When the beam was in its position we hoisted up the cabinet containing the stackbox for the 3-stack and for this 2-stack since the low 6el is still missing, I added the L match I built earlier and after measurements the stack resonated exactly where we wanted with ufb VSWR.

We got to test the stack immediately since we operated 20m SSB as SK9HQ in the IARU contest. With pretty much perfect propagation on 20m we had a blast working 3516 qsos where 52% were DX (!). This seem to be a result which beats most HQ stations and I am extremely excited about this result and we did not have a single hour under 100 qsos. Operators in the contest was me (SM2WMV), SM3JLA and SM2LIY. SM2XJP and SM2XLL helped with the hoist of the antenna so thank you guys for that!

[View with PicLens]

12►