Welding and other fun stuff

The problem with the kitten and her mom seem to have solved itself. When I came here they were both gone, so I assume that she took him home. She was probably coming from a home with dogs, since she didn’t get angry at my girlfriends dog, so my guess is that is why she did give birth to her kittens at another location.

I built a fold over base for the 18m tower. It turned out pretty good and was built from what I had here at the QTH. It isn’t a copy of the regular solution using a big base plate, but this should work just as good. Now I need to transport the tower from my work QTH to this place, which I hope will happen in two weeks.

SM2LIY showed up on Friday and we did some work dragging branches and I did cut down the last trees I felt needed to go around the WARC tower. As usual its a lot of work, even if its just a few trees these were a bit bigger, about 10-15 years older than the ones on the other side of my property. There is a bit more work to be done before I can get the excavator there, so I guess that won’t happen next weekend but we will see. SM2LIY had plans on going here a bit before next weekend and start the work, so maybe there is hope.

SM2NOG showed up today and with him was SM2HWG with wife Cindy. I hadn’t met Cindy in 2 years so that was a pleasant surprise. They picked some berries since I have quite a lot of them on my property. SM2NOG had the base bearing for the 40m rotatable tower project with him, a real beast which comes from a crane. Its 1m in diameter and I didn’t manage to lift it with my arms, and SM2NOG broke his back getting it up on the trailer. SM2DMU has donated a guy ring for us, which I also need to get picked up but there is too much work, so my hope of getting it up before the snow is kind of gone. We will aim for having the concrete poured and all guy wire anchors in the ground. The rest of my effort will be put on the WARC tower, which will be holding a temporary 5el 20m beam (which I traded with SM2DMU against an RA-400 military transceiver), because this is where we are very limited today. But now this will give us a independent rotatable antenna for 20m, which will help a lot when working multipliers.

I also have plans on measuring out where our third tower project is going to be located. This is because its a lot of trees that need to be taken down, and its on the most dense part of my land, which would mean that doing it manually would probably take a whole summer. So my idea was that if some neighbor is going to have machines nearby, they could take down the trees I need them to remove at my place too. This would save me lots of time and might even bring me some money to. The tower is a 52m high 76/1000 (76mm tubing, 1000mm side/side) which has been donated by SM2EKM and is currently lying at his ranch, waiting to be transported down to SJ2W. Plan for this tower is to hold a 80m yagi and the big stacks for 10/15m on side mounts.

Inside the shack the fourth operating position was finished. Now I just need to get some connectors on a cable and its routed out to the switch room too. So the four openASC controlled positions are finished and seem to be working!

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