Part of the ARRL DX SSB weekend was spent lending a hand at N1LN/N1YXU. Bruce and Laurie’s aluminum farm has sprouted a nice shiny new 5 element 15m monobander at about 95 feet. Really nice. That gives them three choices on the 15m tower, or beaming more than one direction for contest runs. Way cool.
This project was set up for Saturday, but everyone on site agreed that the winds were just too high to try to fly such a kite. We re-grouped on Sunday, when the winds had calmed to a more reasonable level.
The antenna hoist went well, but not without a bit of frustration. The antenna was just long enough for the ends of the boom to snag on the top guys. After a few moments of judicious tugging by the ground crew, then a long reach and a lot of strong arming by the day’s tower climbers brought the beast to rest on the top of the stick of Rohn 25. A stubborn connector caused N1LN to climb a second time as far as the stack match, to put a temporary kludge on the feedline from the top antenna. That means there will be a third climb sometimes for him to make a more permanent correction.
Everyone made it safely up and down the tower, and there were no problems on the ground. The job from start to finish was done in an hour or so, padded with a like amount of chit-chat. Bruce later reported snagging a few choice Pacific DX during the latter part of the contest, and a signal report from a KH6 of an S7 f/b ratio on swinging the new beam.
There is still a a lot of heavy lifting to take care of next to finish his build. There is a 20 mast that needs to go up the inside of the 40m tower. It’s scheduled to hold a 2el 40m yagi on top and a log-periodic just above the tower at the base of the 20ft mast. Then finally a 10m antenna above the lower el 40m yagi.
Oh, yeah….The flock of buzzing cable ties came whistling to earth as N1LN negotiated the lower set of guys on his trip down.
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