[CQ-Contest] ARRL and Contesters

[dennis o'connor]

Incidentally, for those who think cw or contesting is declining, they
should have been on 160m this weekend. Even K1ZZ was there.

73,W4NZ

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I made a single  pass across the band Saturday night, worked a few 
stations for fun, but mostly was amusing myself using Randy's US/VE 
Master.dta to sort through the calls heard... The majority of (>50%) 
folks I heard are not those who are listed as contesting in either SS 
or the usual DX contests... Yes, the big guns were there, and loud as 
usual... Didn't happen to hear our Topband resident curmudgeon, W8JI, 
though...

My lack of contesting was the failure to repair the shorts in the 
insulators at the base of the transmit tower, in spite of 6 hours of 
busting my cajones out in the snow  - chipped/scraped/hammered off the 
epoxy outer coating (which had crazed and allowed water ingress), then 
removed the 12 clamp bolts, drilled and brushed out the micarta tubes, 
replaced all of the micarta shoulder washer/insulators, and installed 
new SS bolts... It's still showing about 140K ohms  somewhere across 
the three insulators at DC (was about 10 ohms before I started), but it 
is an erratic and variable resistance path that partially breaksdown 
under 100 watts of RF... It's an interesting feeling to be standing 
underneath 13 sections of Rohn 25 that is squatting there without a 
single bolt holding the base from kicking sideways if a sudden wind 
comes up... I was V E R Y carefull and only did that long enough to get 
impedence and dc measurements - then got some bolts back in place, 
snicker snack...

Anyway, my last option is drilling out each clamp bolt hole one at a 
time to a larger size, then rebuilding them with new micarta tubing, SS 
bolts, and shoulder washers... If that fails it means that the body of 
the insulator block(s) has RF tracked right down through the solid 
material, then the tower comes down (ugh)....

Denny

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