Monthly Archives: June 2009

Power meter

I worked a bit on one of my other projects today for the station. I changed the micro controller on the board since I managed to break the other one and started to do some programming. The power meter will be compatible with various pickups with various power ranges. The input voltage to the input board is maximum 10V (peak to peak) and when larger voltages are used the scaling is done inside the pickup. As an example the pickup I made can measure 6W reflected power at 5kW forward power, so the attenuation between the ports is very high.

Here are some pictures, the power is just a simulation, not the actual power 🙂

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I will do some more work on this device during poor weather when no outside work can be done. I will also then try it for real with RF power and see how it acts.

Cutting more trees

Now all trees around the 18m tower which will hold the secondary antennas for 15m have been taken down. Now left to take down are some bigger trees running along the guy wires for the 60m tower. I will take down those who looks a bit threatening and let the smaller ones be, it’s too much work to remove them all so I can take them down when it’s needed instead. I want to eliminate the risk of any big tree falling on the guy wires in case of a heavy storm.

I also painted the guy wire rings for the 60m tower and removed all grease in them. I will fill them up with new grease before putting the tower up. I just need to find some which has got a wide temperature range.

Here are more pictures

More pictures from week

A lot of work got done this weekend. Both inside the house and outside. It rained during the beginning of the week and last weekend so I ended up doing some work nailing cables to the wall etc. Outside we dug the holes (which was mentioned earlier) for the 60m tower and I started to fix the guy anchors for this. The anchors consist of 2.7m long logs which are pressure treated to handle lying a long time in the ground. They are a bit heavy though to handle by yourself but I managed to get 2 of them into their holes, the last one we are missing a couple of parts for. Luckily we seem to get to borrow a L70 tractor from the same guys who dug the holes to fill them back up, this is a relief since I manged to fill about 1/3 of a hole during several hours of work. The muddy ground is not easy to dig in.

Here are some more pictures from what happened during the week.

Holes have been dug

After some phone calls the local company GTL had time to come out and dig the holes for the 60m tower. He came with an Ã…kerman H3 excavator which is a 8500kg heavy machine which is kind of perfect for this job since it has got an easy time to access everything.

It took about 2-3 hours to dig all holes. The first guy wire point was a breeze but the center position for the tower did have some rocks and the second guy wire post we ended up with a large rock, which made us move the guy wire point back about 50cm, not a big deal at all. The third point was no problem either and now I will need to throw down the guy wire anchors and refill the holes, which will be done by hand and will take some time.

Here are some pictures, tomorrow I will continue to cut down some more trees and gonna throw down the guy wire anchors so that if it starts to rain it does not matter if the soil falls into the hole.