The excavator paid a visit

This weekend me and my girlfriend went down to the QTH on Friday. I did put up boards on one of the walls in the barn and after that I spent some time upgrading the openASC boxes to the newest firmware, and a bug I have been struggling to find seem to have been solved. On Saturday I did spend time to prepare for having the excavator over but when I called him he was out flying, so he said he’d be there on Sunday instead.

I continued some outdoor work mixing concrete in the wheelbarrow since the concrete mixer was borrowed by SA2AWO for his tower project. It needed four of those wheelbarrows full with concrete to fill up the hole I dug for the 18m tower. The result is quite nice, I will need to adjust the bottom bracket for the tower a bit but that is easily done with four nuts under the bracket.

When I was inside resting I heard a horn from a car sound, and when I checked SM3JLA came driving and apparently he did morse code on the horn but I was so surprised so I didn’t copy it, but he states he was signaling a very inappropriate Swedish word which I will not mention here 😉 Anyway, we spent the evening finishing up the elements for the 40m Yagi and tensioned the element guy support. On Sunday we carried them out to the field where the boom was waiting, and we mounted them onto the boom and also mounted the boom strut and its guy lines. Now I’ll let it hang for a week until next weekend when I will tighten it and mount the parts for the feed system, coax etc. We also finished up the elements for the 10m Yagi, so now it is missing the coax and then its ready to be tuned and hoisted. Unfortunately this will not happen before SAC CW, but hopefully before SAC SSB at least.

On Sunday afternoon after SM3JLA left, Göran from a local company in the village came by with his Åkerman H3 excavator. He dug holes for the 18m tower guy anchors which we hoisted down and filled up again. We also fixed the anchors for the 40m military tower project and did dig the hole for the base of that tower, and finally he made a ditch between the house and barn where I will put down another 110mm tube to pull cables through. I need to buy some bends for that tube and we can start filling it up again next weekend.

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