[TowerTalk] tower work

[W7lr]

Thanks to all for the good ideas on tower work safety.  At age 76 and in
Montana I need all the good advice available in climbing my 75' tower.
A couple of years ago I had a project that wasn't feasible even with the tower
cranked down - this idea would only work with a crankup (down).  I had a TH7
on the tower, and a WARC beam on another smaller tower, and wanted them both
on the 75' tower.  Not too hard to get the WARC beam down, but next needed a
sturdy mast for the two antennas.  Got out the W6QHS book and calculated what
mast was needed - and the local steel outlet ordered it from Salt Lake City
and delivered it to my qth.  OK, now how to put all this together?  This is
sort of heroic but what I did was to build a scaffold to the 20' level near
the top of the fixed tower section so that I had a nice working platform.
Having an extension ladder to the platform made it easy to get up and down
from the platform.  I did all the work myself except dropping the 150# mast
into the tower, with help from N7ML.  
I figured the tribander should be as high as possible, so put it at the top of
the mast and the WARC beam just above the tower.  Cranked the tower up and
redid the 16 guy wires and it looked great.  However it was clear that the
tower didnt like that much leverage in the wind and so cranked it back down
and put the WARC beam at the top (no easy job threading that beam up thru the
TH7).  Now with a newly added CREATE rotator it is a great system. Also this
rotator is worm gear driven and so no teeth to break off.  I needed that
rotator to fit inside the top tower section.  This whole project went pretty
slowly, with raising things up a few inches at a time with an auto jack and
metal mast clamps - I kept my fingers and hands out of the way!  The other
hindsight problem is that the pine and spruce trees that used to be small seem
to be growing up not too far from the tower - keep this in mind when locating
your tower and trees!  Since finishing the project I wanted a six meter beam -
so chose a 3 element with a short boom so that I could handle that, and added
it about 5' above the TH7.  The whole HF system seems to work - worked all
countries on cw except P5.  I know that many of these ideas may not apply in
your case, but there might be a few that would help.
Now to listen for that BY1QH that I heard yesterday on 1822.5 khz (on my 90'
irrigation pipe vertical). 73 Bob W7LR

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