Loos addendum

[BK1ZX70SFL at aol.com]

Yikes, I will be reposting the original posting I pulled the Loos address
info off of when I find it on my hard drive....probably in the Towers/Guys
folder....qrx a few more minutes.

Several asked an obvious question...so how were your old eyeball sightings
compared to the gauge....answer: Now you know why the gauge made me so
happy....they were way out of whack with one another...even lines which
seemed to sag equally were under different tension.

A good point was made that the gauge may not accurately reflect the actual
tension rating of the guys since we hams use it for the rigid-er EHS cable,
and sailboat users, who the gauge was designed for, are probably working with
the more flexable wire rope. The way I see it, since all the guys are of the
same material and we set them all to the same settings they are equally off.
Yup they are probably not on the money - but this is not an engineers
technically demanding device, it is an approximation...however, it is a
repeated approximation. 

I forgot to mention that the towers looked great as I drove away from the
station yesterday....but then they always do.

An interesting phenomenon we experienced and I forgot to mention in my
posting is the inter relationships of the guy wires - when using an equalizer
plate with three guys extending away the two outside ones most definately
effect (or is that affect) each other. I was about to give up hope on one of
the early guys and figured it was time to remove the dead ends and rework
them - its turnbuckle was at the end of its run. When we went over to the
opposite end of the equalizer plate, and adjusted that guy in the right
neighborhood the first one was again in adjustment range. Sort of a push-pull
operation.

If you have equalizer plates tightening the top one or bottom is porbably the
worst place to start as it will screw up the other...after a while we went to
starting with the middle one, got it close then adjusted the outer ones. 

This thing is so easy to use that a hurdle like this is peanuts ...it pops on
and off the guys so easily you just do it! Its no big thing to swap it around
as you adjust...ez.

Thanks for reminding me about that inter related push pull phenom, senor
major league internet guru!

Jim zx      k1zx at contesting.com