Category Archives: Work weekend - Page 28

A shitty welcome

Posted by sm2wmv on April 29, 2012 1 comment

When me and Teemu (SM0W) arrived at SJ2W today after a nice weekend in Umeå at an SSA ham meeting and I got down into the basement I was met with 10cm of water on the floor with poop floating around. Luckily it was about 2cm from the granger amplifier so we arrived just in time. After a few hours of work from a clean up crew they did emtpy the crap-well. So now we will see how much I get from the insurance company but luckily no radio gear was damaged. However one room in the basement has got a wooden floor which is now ruined. This kind of sucks the motivation out of me and we will see how much money I will have left after this for antenna projects, might need to put all the plans on hold (aaargh!).

Anyway, I showed a video tour of SJ2W during this ham meeting and I have published it on youtube. Currently it is in Swedish but I have plans to make a dubbed version in English.

WARC tower raised

Posted by sm2wmv on November 21, 2011 Comments Off

This weekend the plan was to borrow the L70 tractor from GTL which is the local company who has made all the excavation and we’ve borrowed the tractor before and they also put up the first 36m of the 60m tower. And as long as SM2XJP drives the tractor we don’t seem to have any problems to borrow it, since they know he can handle it very well. We also borrowed the long arm which made us able to lift 8.5m straight up in the air.

SM2XLL showed up and helped me put some extra wire support for the tower, as extra safety to ease the load of the tower during the first part of the lift. Just when we were about to start the lift SM3JLA showed up and could help us. We had to start over during the first attempt since we hooked the tractor arm a bit too high up on the tower. When we moved it 1m down it worked just fine and we were able to raise it rather quickly.

The plan was to put up the 5el CUE DEE monobander for 20m but I had underestimated the size of it, so when we started to look where to lift it from we realized that we needed to take down around 5 trees, and with 3 hours of daylight left to do the lift we felt it was not possible to make it in time. Considering it was just meant to sit there temporarily mainly for CQWW CW to make us more flexible, we just dissembled the antenna and put it away to hopefully get it up next year in the 40m tower. So this tower will stand without any antenna during the winter and get the WARC duobander next year plus the 6m beam.

Lots of pictures, most taken by my girlfriend Anna.

[Show as slideshow]

Top section finished and SK2AU 80m vertical

Posted by sm2wmv on October 25, 2011 1 comment

This weekend we had plans to maybe get the 18m tower erected. But unfortunately the neighbor hadn’t the tractor at home so he was not able to remove the logs. I doubt we would have had time to get it up anyway, but now we are at least closer to the goal. I finished up the top section and me and SM2XLL carried it out to where it will be hoisted from. We also leveled out the base plate. On Sunday SM2XJP and I did mount the guy wire attachments on the top section and I managed to find the wires needed to put up the tower, so hopefully we can do it the weekend after CQWW DX SSB.

I did also code a lot of openASC. The latest revisions which haven’t been tested at the station yet contained some bugs which I were not able to find, so I went back to a known good revision and fixed the problems I found trying to fix the latest revision. Now I will need to add functionality and test it at the station.

On Sunday me and SM2XJP also built the 80m vertical for SK2AU. They had an CUE DEE vertical earlier which they lost some winters ago, so I ordered aluminum to repair it (the bottom 15m). It just took a couple of hours to do it, guess we are getting used to make pipes fit nowadays 🙂 So hopefully they can now get it up before the winter at the club house.

I also built some stubs today for 20 and 40m which will be used for radio 3/4 at the station. I will add more stubs in the future but radio 3 will be operational on 20/40 as a mult station during CQWW this weekend, hence I did put priority on those two bands. We will be operating in the M/S category, so look for us! If you record the contest and work us, then please send the recordings to us, we really would appreciate that.

Known operators right now, will be SE2T, SM2LIY, SM2WMV and SM3JLA.

[Show as slideshow]

Top section finished

Posted by sm2wmv on October 17, 2011 Comments Off

Last weekend we found that the cats were back at the QTH living in my barn. The kitten was now a bit older but still as shy as before. I didn’t really manage getting to hold him and SM3JLA was bitten by him in the finger when he was trying to figure out if a human hand was eatable or not. Since he hasn’t really had any interaction with humans this was of course understandable. Anyhow by Monday when I was going to go home I got to touch him a bit and I laid down one of my sweaters making a bed for them when I left. Our plan was to bring them back home with us this weekend when the girlfriend was going to come down too with the car. However I put a neck-less on the mother with a message and my phone number in case that she actually belong somewhere.

Just as we turned onto the gravel road leading to the QTH the phone called and a girl asked if it was us who had put the neck-less on their cat. So we talked a bit and it showed to be the neighbor further down the road (1.5km or so). So I explained everything and they knew that she had gotten kittens but they never found them. When we arrived at the QTH the kitten was running fast to me and was very eager to interact which was funny since the sweater “trick” seemed to have worked. The owners were happy to see the little kitten and picked him up on Saturday evening.

This weekend I spent some time doing the awful job of finishing the isolation work up in the attic, but now its finally done and the roof has gotten an extra 24cm of isolation which should keep the heating costs down during the winter months.

After that was done I started work on the top section for the WARC tower. It will have an alfa spid rotor in it and I did the mounting brackets for both the rotor itself and the bearing at the top of the tower. The pipe is a 60mm galvanized steel pipe and will hold a brand new 5el CUE DEE monobander for 20m this winter. I will rebuild the driven element of this beam to hairpin as on all other beams before we put it up, but I will not optimize the design anything this year but wait until it goes up in the 40m tower instead. Hopefully we can get the tower up next weekend but I doubt we can get it all running before CQWW SSB, but we will try.