Monthly Archives: July 2009

More work done

SM2NOG showed up on Saturday with a concrete blender which we used to mix up concrete for the base. A couple of hours later the base was done and we did also make the concrete base for the 18m tower.

On Sunday evening the excavator showed up and we filled up the anchor holes for the 60m tower but also dug and finished the guy wire anchors for the 18m tower and the 160m vertical. So now all the digging needing to be done this season has been done.

Big thanks to SM3SGP who left on Monday but was here and helped me out for almost a week!

On Monday evening I mixed the concrete for the pillar and now the base is pretty much done. Now the concrete need some time to get hard and after that we can drill down the expander bolts holding the tower base.

Here are some pictures

SM3SGP arrived!

I haven’t updated the page for a while, sorry about that. Anyway, a lot of work has been done lately. First we had the field day (which I will post pictures from later) and after that SM3SGP showed up after his trip up north for SM2EKMs wedding. Gus stayed for several days and helped out a lot with preparations for the 60m tower lift.

First we went to get material so that we could start making the concrete base for the 60m tower. After that we leveled out the ground in the pit, added the isolation in the bottom and made a form for the concrete base which the pilar would stand on. When that was done we did some work lying down isolation above the guy wire anchor points for the 60m tower and lowered down the rebar cage which I put together earlier during the week.

Rebar, rebar and more rebar

I bought some rebar which I was going to use for the base of the 60m tower. I did weld a cage and also strenghten it a bit extra where the pilar would be positioned. After getting tired of the welder shutting down because of overheating all the time I added a fan to it which kept air breezing through it instead of the air standing still like before.

Here are some pictures

Hairpin conversion

As has been seen on the homepage I have been working on rebuilding the matching system of the beams I have which is currently gamma. I installed a new hairpin system on one of the 10m beams and we put it up in the small 16m tower that was temporarily holding the 3el yagi for 20m. We had trouble at first to get any proper readings of the matching system but after adding an RF choke that problem was removed and we got some decent measurements. However the system is currently resonating too low so we will need to try to trim it in a bit more.

Here are pictures of the finished system and the installation of the 10m beam. The Antenna is at around 15-16m and another 6el will be positioned at 5-6m below the top one. We tested the old gamma match first to check bandwidth etc before we installed the hairpin.