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Mother Nature served up a beautiful day today so I hopped on the opportunity to get the guy wire mount post in place. Five 60 pound bags of concrete and 10 feet of rebar later, it's up and even plumb! Some say to stop the concrete a few inches from the top of the hole and fill with soil but oh...

I was going to do the concrete for one of the posts today but Mother Nature decided to throw a bunch of rain at us again. Better than the snow she surprised us with on Monday, May 1. So, I adjourned to the workshop to see if I can come to terms with the new MIG welder and at least get...

The guy wire stuff has arrived and good news. The guy wire ring fits the 2-3/8" mast just fine after I swapped out a bit longer eye bolts. Also, I changed my mind on how I am anchoring the pulley at the bottom. I am going to anchor it in the concrete instead of using a sheave between bottome...

Well, I am slowly but surely making progress. I am making sure to not make this project feel like an unpleasant task so I am taking my time and enjoying other things too. I still need to get the motorcycle out of storage but the weather hasn't been cooperating much lately. It's May 1 and today...

I have a mast with an OD of 2-3/8" and need to connect guy wires to it. I am hoping three will suffice but we'll see. Has anyone come across a guy wire ring like this that will fit a 2-3/8" mast? So for the largest one I can find only goes up to a 2-1/4" mast like the EZ-Up pictured below. I'm...

Very nice! That looks very sturdy.

Time for another speed bump. The M104C takes a mast size of 2" OD. That's a good fit for the Yaesu rotor and thrust bearing I have. The M104 is being mounted horizontally and the M58 will be just above it without the ground plane radials. The V58 takes a 1.25" mast so I need to be able to reduce...

If I end up getting something like a Palomar Engineers MC-1-3000 choke, I'll have to do some experimentation to see if it works best on the radio side or on the antenna side of the MFJ-272 lightning protector (which I have been told should be replaced by an Alpha Delta ATT3G50UHP). Then I'll...

It's a shame to remove these shavings created while de-burring the inside of one of the galvanized mast pieces before inserting the sleeve. Mother Nature showed she can do something similar all by herself.

I will take a look at that. The balun/choke stuff is still a science I don't quite grasp but as long as it works, I'm game. I do have one smallish ferrite I've been moving around on the coax e.g. right by the radio, outside before the MFJ-272 lightning arrestor and also after it, but no effect...

Well, the project is still progressing although not as quickly as I'd like. Life has a way of doing that. I have collected nearly everything I need to finish the project except for coax, guy wire, another batch of concrete mix, ummm, I'm sure there's more. I decided to make my own tilting base...

No noticeable change in wattage but I run the amp on the conservative side. I put the ferrite on the coax because I was reading about some signal backwash/harmonics possibly being a cause and a suggested step is to install one or more ferrites preferably where the coax connects to the antenna...

Are you thinking this because of the SWR issue (that may have been resolved by removing the lightning arrestor temporarily) or because of the new reports of the SSB modulation starting to get choppy/crackly despite no changes to any of the hardware or setup?

I am having a slowly growing high SWR issue with my 200HDC amp (running at 14.5 volts) turned on high that gets worse as the frequency increases from channel 1 to 40. The SWR on channel 1 is 1.1:1 with the amp off or on, on channel 40 it is about 1.4:1 with the amp off and 2.5:1 or higher with...

Mine (200HDC) is screwed on.

This 2" OD, 0.5" wall, 48" long T6061 aluminum tube may be strong enough to cut in half and use 24" of it in each of the two mast junctions. Kinda pricey though, so I am going to chew on it a bit and try to track down its specs.

Today's puttering involves determining how I am going to attach the three 11 foot long, 10 gauge posts into one 33' long segment. This will form the backbone of the mast and will support the rotator and thrust bearing brackets. The pipes have an OD of 2.375" (60.33mm) and an ID of about 2.115"...

The second-hand free-standing Universal Tower 15-40 I had planned on using requires a 4' x 4' x 4' concrete base as per their documentation. That plan got shot down when the utility companies came to check the lot and marked at least two underground services where I wanted to put the tower.

It looks like the 10 gauge pipe I am using for the new mast (three pipes, so two joints) has an OD of 2.375", a wall thickness of 0.130" and an ID = 2.115" (53.75mm). Now to locate a suitable tube to slide inside the mast pipe to reinforce each of the two joints, maybe have 18" to 24" of...

The rotator and thrust bearing mounting plates have arrived as have the four 10-gauge, 11 foot long pipes. Three pipes are for the mast and one for the gin pole. The two mast joints will have inner reinforcing sleeves as will the bottom few feet of the gin pole.