Topband: Wednesday 160m CW Activity Night

[David Olean]

I am starting to feel "shell- shocked".   I had two storms come through 
here in rapid succession. Storm #1 produced incredibly heavy wet snow. 
It caused many trees to suffer with large broken limbs. The snow depth 
was 13.5 inches. It really stuck to the trees. All of my eight beverage 
antennas were damaged as they run though the woods and had all sorts of 
large branches fall on them, dropping the wires.  Then the XYL and I 
both got Covid and were sick in bed for a week or so. This past Friday, 
a large rain/ windstorm wiped everything out. We lost power for a few 
days and the temps dropped to single digits for a few days.  Everything 
froze up solid. Many of the beverage wires managed to get frozen to the 
ground. (Not fun) My internet connection was out for almost five days. 
The damage is quite bad to many of the trees and the typical scene is a 
24" tree trunk (White Pine) snapped in half about 25 ft up off the 
ground. The top part then falls and takes out many trees around it as it 
comes down. I counted six big trees down across the beverages and many 
of the wires have snapped. I spent a day chain sawing and then followed 
up with another day repairing the beverage wire with home made splices. 
I use aluminum wire and the splices are aluminum barrels with four sets 
of 8-32 s.s. set screws. The high winds combined with huge amounts of 
water and the melting snow plus rain managed to wash out the road that 
goes up to my VHF hamshack. I had just paid to have the road repaired 
about a month ago and all the stone they put down is now gone or in the 
wrong place!

After two days of working in the woods, I have some of the wires fixed. 
I figure another two days and I will have the 160 receive antennas 
working again. I m  not sure what to do about the road.

73

Dave K1WHS

On 12/27/2022 4:46 PM, Roger Kennedy wrote:
> Sorry to see that so many of you in North America are suffering with
> horrendous winter weather at the moment.
>
> For those of you who can sill get on 160m, hope to see some of you on the
> band this week.
>
> 73 Roger G3YRO
>
>
>
>
> _________________
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