Inband electronics, tower climbing and Hi-Z array work

My last vacation week I spent time working on the inband electronics, the 868 MHz RF-link that will be used to control remote stuff at the station, such as RX-arrays, 4-SQ at distance and mainly the inband tower site. I have made some 868 MHz modules with BPFs on the input which also acts as surge protectors. I climbed up and exchanged the one we put up in the 60m tower (which was temporary just to try) with the proper one and it seem to work great. I also had the laptop with me and re-configured the APRS I-gate but of course I was missing some DLL-files so I spent probably 15 minutes figuring that out at 52m with the laptop. Luckily I had internet coverage up there 🙂

Some work has also been done getting some boxes around all the rotors for the rotating towers. I plan to make a roof for the military tower also before the snow arrives, since it happens that it freezes up during the winter.

I also started to work on getting the Hi-Z 4-SQ array that SA0AZT donated. He won it when he was in Dayton and didn’t really feel he needed it, so he was very kind and gave it to us instead. I have made some verticals from old CUE DEE 20m yagi elements which I extended a bit. I also made some insulators from some plastic tubes I got from SM3WMU once and managed to attach them.

SM2UVU came for a couple of days and helped me out, we got a lot done so the current state is that the verticals are vertical in their proper position. I have bought some 16x2mm plastic pipe (150m) that I will use to put the cables in between the verticals, to help protect them. I will also put the coax from the array on the ground the last ~50m so that I don’t get any strange effects from having the coax up in the air. So I want to put the cable in the plastic tubes so it might survive the lonely bored critter.

I went to the SK2AU club meeting, which I try to do at least once every summer when I have vacation and it was great. I managed to buy 90m of 1/2″ and 45m of 7/8″ for a decent price. Me and SM2UVU also went to the SK2AU flea market on the Saturday following the club meeting and scored some stuff. I bought a bunch of linear power supplies which will come handy now when I am trying to get rid of the unnecessary switched supplies.

Stay tuned…

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