Hi herb
I know where you are coming from. I am getting older and cannot do what
I used to do. Today I am confronted by a station that is beyond my
capability to keep up. Trying to get on 432 for the Sprint shows what I am
up against. This winter was really bad for winds. I saw stuff happen this
year to antennas that have been riding out the winds for at least ten years
with no troubles. The 432 main mast bent. It is a high strength steel mast
with over 100,000 psi tensiles. My eight yagi 432 array was just too much
for the mast. One of the top yagis broke loose and ended up hanging from the
topmost H frame. I tried to climb up there but it was just too scary. I had
two gin poles for added support, but I still felt like I was asking for a
serious problem if I tried to shinny up the 15 ft mast. We ended up taking
the rotor out and dropping the bent mast and removed the bottom H frame,
leaving just four yagis. There was no receive on the smaller array now. What
could be wrong now? I traced it to a bad Transco Y relay up on the tower.
It had two problems. First was dirty contacts. The second failure mode after
I cleaned it was one of the coils opened up! I ended up re building the
tower mounted relay and preamp box and stringing up a new control cable with
more conductors and a bigger MIL type multi pin connector. I had to make up
new 1/2" Superflex and LDF cables to accomodate the new box. Putting that up
at 100 ft on my wind swept ridge line was difficult, as it has been windy
most days, with rain squalls. The first time I climbed up with the tested
box and 150 ft of new control cable, the winds built up to 35 to 40 mph. I
just managed to get the box installed. I had to tie everything to the tower
with ropes in case the wind ripped it out of my grip. I was too scared to go
above the tower to work on the cables, so I had to come back the next day to
finish connecting things up.
Wednesday morning, I was working on a new switching scheme for the
antennas down in the shack after getting the tower box installed. I had to
modify my sequencer to get isolated relay contacts for the new relay scheme.
I got it all hooked up at 6:30PM just before the Sprint. I turned on the
amplifier but the remote blower did not come on. It is in a housing outside
the shack and too difficult to get at in the fading light. With no air, I
could not run my big amplifier. I then tried to hook up the driver amp and
run 80 watts, but was greeted by infinite VSWR when I keyed up the driver
amp. A little checking showed that there seemed to be no antenna up on the
tower. (I was hearing signals on 432 just fine) I checked the TX feedline
with a TDR and saw a big bump 140 ft away that did not change when the radio
was keyed on. A lot of head scratching and puttering around occurred while
the Sprint was going on. WA1T was here too. We tried all sorts of tests, and
figured that maybe I goofed up some wiring in the new tower mtd box. We
finally found out that we were not getting 24 VDC up to the relay on the
tower. We finally found a bad set of contacts on the first relay in the
sequencer. Then we hooked up the computer to the radio, and, as soon as I
told the logging program what radio I had connected, the transmitter locked
up in transmit. The only way I could fix it was to unplug the RS-232 port. I
grabbed a pen to make a sketch of how to fix stuff, and the pen broke apart,
and the back end of the pen flew through the air, and the ink refill part
flew out the door. By this time it is 8:30 local time, and many people are
going QRT already. Al and I decided to solder a short jumper wire with an
alligator clip on it to manually turn on the tower mtd coax relay each time
we wanted to call someone. At almost 9 PM we made our first contact with 80
watts and half of the old antenna. At one point, I got zapped when hooking
up the alligator clip, and my arm jerked back and ripped the alligator clip
and wire right out of the sequencer. Talk about going backwards.
I can get on 160 meters by running 100 ft of RG-213 to the base of my
tower. There are no tower mtd preamps, no expensive coax relays, no LDF
jumpers to be weatherproofed. All I have to do is show up and everything
works. CU on the low bands.
Dave K1WHS
----- Original Message -----
From: "Herb Krumich via VHFcontesting" <vhfcontesting@contesting.com>
To: <vhfcontesting@contesting.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2015 5:11 PM
Subject: [VHFcontesting] Sprint
I had a young gentleman operate from my location in FN21.
One small problem is having the 4 x 33's at only 25 feet, although he was
able to make some decent contacts. No leaves on the trees here in the
Pocono's
He never worked the grid I live in which is FN21. I think many stations
were only looking for logger schedules instead of tuning or calling CQ.
Totals here were 32 and 18 with no logger skeds.
This confirms my station leaving VHF contesting. Since seven years ago,
this same station worked 80 contacts in the 432 sprint. Very sad but
reality.
Anyone want sked off the moon, I can operate on 144 - 432 - 902 - 1296 and
2304
73's
Herb K2LNS
_______________________________________________
VHFcontesting mailing list
VHFcontesting@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/vhfcontesting
_______________________________________________
VHFcontesting mailing list
VHFcontesting@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/vhfcontesting
|