160m vertical ready for the snow

This weekend SM2XJP helped me to fix the top aluminum tube for the 160m vertical. It now consist of 24m of WIBE tower sections and an tapered aluminum tube which is in total 14m long making the vertical 37m high. On Friday evening when me and the gf arrived to the QTH I constructed the mounting brackets for the CUE DEE clamps which holds the aluminum tube. These clamps make it a lot easier to hoist the top tube instead of regular exhaust clamps which would have been a nightmare to use, atleast for this.

On Saturday morning SM2XJP arrived and I climbed up the tower to mount the bracket for the top tube. When that was done we ate lunch and after lunch started to hoist the pipe. After a while in the tower I finally managed to get the tube into position and the guy lines were secured and on the way down I removed the temporary steel guy wires. After a cup of coffee me and SM2XJP spent the afternoon tuning the antenna to have 50 ohms.

We also struggled a bit before we managed to mount the 7/16″ connector to the RG-17 cable but after a while we managed. I bought some 7/16″ connectors for 1/2″ cable from SM2A (SM2ILF) which can be used for RG-17 if you remove some parts of it. You will not have the cable mechanically fixed very well but some tape solves that.

Now we’ll see how well the antenna works, when we have an amp working on 160m!

Here are some pictures, I will post more action pictures later when I have time.

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