What a crap weekend

The reason for the title of this message is that the sewer system is blocked. We tried a lot on Sunday to get the blockage away but unfortunately without much success. Next weekend SM2NOG will come up and try to help us to get it open again and in worst case I need to get some pros to do it, but that cost $$$.

Otherwise the weekend was great. My mom and dad visited us with their newly bought trailer. I had given my dad the task of drawing the new kitchen. When I bought this place the guy before unexpected passed away. Just before this he had ordered a new kitchen which has been sitting out in the barn since then. My dad loves to do carpentry and he has built several kitchens before and wanted to do this one as well. So probably in September he will come up and install it.

SM2XJP also came by and helped us clean up the timber which was taken down by SE2T last autumn and SM2XLL also came by for a visit. We all went to check out a tower which SK2AU (www.sk2au.org) had announced on their site being available to take down if wanted. However the tower was probably 25-30m high and not of the right type for us to use. I am looking for another tower which can be made rotational for the main 10m and 15m stacks.

SM3JLA also showed up on Friday a few hours after my parents and gf Anna showed up on Saturday. Plan for the weekend again was to hoist the 20m Yagi but it was again too windy and we discovered I did not have enough philistran for the side support of the boom. And of course, because of this the weather got calm on Sunday and the whole day we had perfect lift weather. So instead we decided to hoist up the top mast in the new 18m tower to hold the 5el Yagi for 15m. This went very smoothly and now the mast is in the proper position awaiting the beam and newly greased rotator.

After this was done we took out the parts for the 5el monobander for 15m, donated by SM3WMU. However this Yagi did not have its original boom but instead some weaker one made out of 50mm tubing. I did not like this so we decided to insert a 4m pipe of 60mm tubing making the boom a lot stronger. After this was done we went over the Yagi which was in pretty bad shape and added a lot of new screws to the tubing joints and made sure everything looked good. The driven element will get its SM2WMV hairpin conversion kit assembled next weekend and hopefully be ready to be lifted.

SM3JLA came up with the idea of leaving the gin-pole up in the tower, making it easier to raise the top mast with the Yagi attached. My idea was to use brute force but I believe SM3JLA idea was better 🙂

Comments are closed.