Another tower up

Today in the morning, just after me and SM2LIY woke up SE2T arrived to help us with some work outside. Original plan was to lift the 20m Yagi but because of too much winds all weekend long that job has been postponed. So instead we decided to try getting the 18m high tower up. We were hoping to be able to raise the first 12m by hand by that was not possible, so instead we did raise the first 6m with the gin-pole ready to lift the next section, so that work was done rather quickly. After that we did tension the guy wires, add some rope for extra support and moved the gin-pole up to lift the top section. We hoped that we could lift the top section with the mast inside it but unfortunately the balance of the whole thing got messed up, so we aborted the lift, removed the pipe and tried again.

SM2LIY came up with a very good idea of using some rope to attach the lift wire along the tower section, since the gin-pole is a bit short. This made it a lot more stable and when I got the ropes up @12m I just removed them and steered the tower section easily by hand. So after a whole day of work we have the 18m tower up and now next job on it will be to put up the mast and rotator. The tower will hold a 5el yagi for 15m and 4el yagi for 20m (fixed EU) and the 15m yagi will be rotated by a G-1000SDX. I will need to rebuild the driven elements on the beams first though, since they are gamma matched now and I want all to be hairpin.

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