This weekend was spent doing some various things getting ready to lift antennas up into the 60m tower. The 6el monobander for 10m was finished. The SM2WMV hairpin design is now even closer to perfection, as its mounted on yet another beam. I used the 3/8″ superflex coax I got from SG3P. Unfortunately I didn’t have any 7/16″ connector that did fit this coaxial cable, so I used a PL259 which fits perfectly and soldered that instead. So I will need to get an UHF->N->7/16″ adapter mounted. Not the perfect solution but I will seal it well so we don’t get any problems in the future with it. SM2XJP helped me a bit to finish it up and we flipped it around and attached the boom strut to it. Hopefully we will get it up this weekend and the goal is to also get the 3el for 40m up, but I am happy if we get far enough so its tuned and ready for lift off.

I climbed the tower on Saturday with a rope and block. After getting up to 52m I attached the block and with help of SM2XJP we hoisted the tram wire and the block up to the upper guy wire point. The block got mounted and it was a tough job lifting 52m+ of 8mm wire by hand, but as further down one came with the wire the easier it got, since the weight of the wire itself goes towards equilibrium when it reaches the ground. It was funny because when lifting the wire up to the block with the winch, the block I was using for the lifting rope made terrible noises. But after spitting on it a few times it did quiet down, innovation is the key to building a big contest station 😉

So now the tram wire is in place, the 10m yagi is ready to be tuned. So I am hoping to get to SJ2W on Thursday evening and if weather allows, we will lift the 10m Yagi on Friday. Then the next task is to hoist the 1/2″ coax if I have enough energy left. But if not we will continue work on the ground and hopefully getting the 40m Yagi tuned and ready to be lifted.

Also, big thanks to SM2RIX for giving us a bunch of 1/2″ superflex jumper cables with 7/16″ connectors! Thank you very much Rickard!

Here are some pictures from the weekend and also from SAC CW,

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Today the wasp war continued. This time I think I finished them off using three dl of gasoline into each hole and smoked them out. After that I dug the hole up and filled it back with gravel and sand. So hopefully the war is won but we will see.

SM2XLL came by and helped me to finish up the WARC beam so after he left it was pretty much ready to be tuned. I spent the rest of the day making a boom strut for the 40m 3el Yagi which is in the process of being built. I am quite pleased with how it came out and I really like using square tubing instead of round ones, makes it a lot easier to cut and get the welds nice. Now I need to clean it off and paint it and start building the boom for the Yagi.

SM2LIY arrived in the evening and after some BBQ we hoisted the beam into vertical position with the reflector down and tuned it up. We didn’t need to adjust it anything on 17m but on 12m we had to adjust the hairpin a bit to get a proper match. The beam is not designed to sit in the 60m tower, but it did fit when turning the beam about 30 degrees off, giving it enough room to have a few cm between the elements and tower. So that is the reason why its not pointing exactly as the other beams. The first tests seem very promising and the first QSO was ZP6CW followed by D2CQ.

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Now I have another two weeks of vacation and all the time will be spent at SJ2W. I arrived yesterday with my girlfriend after we had been shopping some iron material for boom struts etc, but also a wood splicer (if that is what they are called) since my girlfriend loves to do that and I hate it, its a perfect match.

I also had war against wasps. On Thursday evening I got stung five times at two different occasions. Once it was when opening one of the doors to the barn, some wasps had built a nest on the door and they attacked me which caused three bites. Later when I was mowing the lawn I got stung two times more. So this created a war between me and the wasps. I first manage to tear down their nest, which I later sprayed with paint and I will continue to do this until they are all gone and I can enter the room again. Later when attaching the winch to the 60m tower I discovered another nest, but this time the kind in the ground. So I poured 1 liter of oil into it and plugged it closed with a stick. Hopefully I have won the war, but we will see if they are still trying to get in tomorrow and if that is the case I’ll use more spray.

Since I am using the work table for the wood splicer I had to build a new work table. I found an old thing in the barn which had wheels, so I modified it and attached a board onto it, so now I have a table which is easier to move and bigger. I’d like to protect the board with some sheet metal, but I don’t have any right now but might to get hold of some.

Tomorrow I plan to finish up the WARC beam, tune it and get it into position in the 60m tower under the first guy ring. Plan is to move it to another tower in the future, but I don’t know when I will be able to get that up.

I will try to update the web page a lot now when I have vacation, so stay tuned!

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This weekend SG3P, SM5EPO and SM3XIK from the mosquito land Öster Färnebo came up. I had told SG3P about a K-600 tower which was right across SM2HWG old QTH in Sikeå since SG3P wanted to add sections to his 38m K-600 tower to make it 64-68m or so. It was quite an adventure with various problems and a very special character that owned the tower. His 3 month old puppies were fun to play with even though SG3P was mainly focused on getting the tower down the rest of us couldn’t keep ourselves from playing with them.

The tower was 26m high and un-guyed, so we had to add some ropes to stop it from moving around too much. It was very windy on Sunday and we had problems getting the bolts loose so after a while we manufactured our own tool which was used to loosen up the bolts, but even then it was quite demanding physically. We only managed to get three sections down on Sunday so we had to go back on Monday and take down the rest, which went very smoothly after we started to figure out all minor issues slowing us down.

SM2LIY worked the first NAC 2m contest from SJ2W. He accidentally heard some guy on 2m FM so he connected his IC-7400 to the 2m vertical and managed to work 10 qsos, the longest qso was OH6QR. He also worked YO8ROO on 2m the day after on the same vertical on Sporadic E.

SM2NOG and I have planned a trip south next week to pick up some aluminum from SM0 and also pay a visit to SK0UX plus stay a day or more at SK3W. Maybe we will help out getting some tower sections up of the ones we just took down 🙂

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