Damn Captain Kilowatt thats some tough luck
if i wasnt in AZ i would jump in my truck and head that way and lend a hand but thats a week of driving and after that i wouldnt be much good to you
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Looks like no yagis again this year however...........
- Thread starter Captain Kilowatt
- Start date
Damn Captain Kilowatt thats some tough luck
if i wasnt in AZ i would jump in my truck and head that way and lend a hand but thats a week of driving and after that i wouldnt be much good to you
DITTO here. I might make it to Ohio before I have to turn around. I have a bunch of goodies I need to get up in the air. I have mast, rotator, yagi antennas. Dual band 144 MHz and 440 MHz and a six meter yagi. The last time I hired somebody to help me they took off with most of my tools. I had pictures of their Driver License and the cops still can't find them. Tools gone and one half of the money I was going to pay them gone.
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Well I did manage to get up the tower but paid the price for it.......and still am. Things went better than I thought going up but later that night I beginning to question the wisdom of having done it. 
Oh well it is what it is. I managed to get a full size 1/4 wave inverted L for 160m with about 58 feet vertical and 70 feet horizontal sloping from 60 feet down to 40 feet at the far end. It was to be fed with an automatic tuner at the feedpoint for all band use but the match was WAAAAY outside the range of the tuner on 80m,40m,20m, and 15m leaving me with only 17m to play with. I cut the wire in half and ended up with a decent match on 80m but again no other bands would match. Oddly enough the antenna analyzer showed R0 j1200 on those bands where the antenna was 1/2 wave or multiple thereof where it should have shown hundreds of ohms of R or even over range at 1500. I also installed a bypass relay so I could bypass the tuner when listening on the longwave or AM broadcast bands as well as if running 160m where I had a decent match without the tuner. Got POed after a while as nothing seemed to work so I placed an order with DX Engineering for a Hustler 5BTV vertical along with theDXE-TB-3P tilt base, theDXE-AOKB-17M 17m add-on kit and DXE-AOK-DCF direct coax feed assembly. It should be here either this afternoon or tomorrow. I am also working on building an 80m trap to install in the inverted L to allow it to be used on 80 and 160m and it should provide better performance than the 5BTV on 80m. I go back to work tomorrow for four days but than I am off for twelve days so I hope to get everything installed then including a good radial field. I plan to build radials with lugs in the evenings after work to have them ready for when I am off. I will keep the 5TBV after I get antennas on the tower and use it either as a spare in case something happens to my yagis or to use when signals are good and I don't want to constantly turn the rotator.
Oh well it is what it is. I managed to get a full size 1/4 wave inverted L for 160m with about 58 feet vertical and 70 feet horizontal sloping from 60 feet down to 40 feet at the far end. It was to be fed with an automatic tuner at the feedpoint for all band use but the match was WAAAAY outside the range of the tuner on 80m,40m,20m, and 15m leaving me with only 17m to play with. I cut the wire in half and ended up with a decent match on 80m but again no other bands would match. Oddly enough the antenna analyzer showed R0 j1200 on those bands where the antenna was 1/2 wave or multiple thereof where it should have shown hundreds of ohms of R or even over range at 1500. I also installed a bypass relay so I could bypass the tuner when listening on the longwave or AM broadcast bands as well as if running 160m where I had a decent match without the tuner. Got POed after a while as nothing seemed to work so I placed an order with DX Engineering for a Hustler 5BTV vertical along with theDXE-TB-3P tilt base, theDXE-AOKB-17M 17m add-on kit and DXE-AOK-DCF direct coax feed assembly. It should be here either this afternoon or tomorrow. I am also working on building an 80m trap to install in the inverted L to allow it to be used on 80 and 160m and it should provide better performance than the 5BTV on 80m. I go back to work tomorrow for four days but than I am off for twelve days so I hope to get everything installed then including a good radial field. I plan to build radials with lugs in the evenings after work to have them ready for when I am off. I will keep the 5TBV after I get antennas on the tower and use it either as a spare in case something happens to my yagis or to use when signals are good and I don't want to constantly turn the rotator.
Well I did manage to wire up an 80m trap today when I got a little spare time. I was going to wire up a coaxial trap but decided to try a regular type instead. The coaxial trap is easy to make but has more loss and lower performance than a regular lumped LC type trap. I use a fiberglass chimney for a 4-400 tube that I had several of as a coil form. It is 2.625 inches in diameter and was cut to about 10 inches long. I found my stash of old silver-mica transmitting capacitors which are perfect for traps as they are hermetically sealed and temperature stable and selected one that was 400pF. Plugging that value into an LC program determined that I needed about 5.2 uH to resonate at about 3.5 MHz. Plugging THAT into another formula gave me the required turns I needed. In the end I ended up with a nice trap with about 10 or 11 turns of 10 gauge wire on the fiberglass form. It resonates at around 3650-3700 KHz. Ideally it should have been a bit lower as you should always resonate your traps outside the frequency range of interest and preferably just below the band of interest. This reduces losses because at the resonant frequency the circulating currents in the trap are very high and this causes IR losses. Also the RF voltages can be very high and there can be a risk of arcing if running high power. I ran out of daylight before inserting it into my antenna so that part will have to wait until at least Sunday as I go back to work tomorrow for four days. By then the Hustler 5BTV should be here so my twelve days off should see me getting some real antenna work done.
As everyone knows the more hardship endured during the process of installing an antenna system the better it works, this should be one heck of a station when you get it going.
Generally speaking for us north of the border, that would be in the dead of winter.
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