[TowerTalk] Antenna adventures part 2

[K7LXC@aol.com]

Greetings, TowerTalkians --
 
      Here's another installment of a week spent in the SF Bay Area doing some
antenna work.

      Whilst I was at Bruce, W6OSP's place, I gave his crank-up the PreLube 6
treatment. This is the cable lubricant that Champion Radio Products sells that
is recommended by the cable manufacturers. The good news is that this stuff
really works. It soaks into the cables and if you spray too much on, it just
runs down the cable continuing its cable penetration. The bad news is that
this stuff is MESSY. You can't avoid spraying it on the tower too. My advice
is to only do it when you're finished doing everything else and you don't have
to go up the tower for awhile. Start at the top of the tower and work your way
down. That way the tower won't be so slippery when you're climbing around on
it. When you get off the tower and you're finished spraying the cables, run
the tower up and down once to exercise the cables and work the lubricant in. 

       My next job was to install a Force 12 C-3SS for K4TKM in The City of
SF. The tower is on top of his house. The C-3SS is a shortened C-3 and has the
smallest turning radius of almost any triband yagi at 13.5 feet (the A3 TR is
15.5 feet). Anyway it's got almost all the gain of the C-3 but physically
smaller. It went together with no problem and I didn't use the instruction
manual until final assembly. The factory pre-assembles it and bundles all the
elements together so it's pretty simple to figure out. Total assembly was
about 3 hours. It uses a linear loading rod configuration and my only
complaint was that there was no really good way to secure the plexiglass
spreaders to the element. I taped them up as well as I could and I hope that
they'll stay put. 

     The KT34A that I took down was totally trashed from the city airborne
pollutants. The tube caps were all cracked and everything was heavily
oxidized. Three months earlier I had installed a new Ham IV and it was TOTALLY
encrusted in grim - I couldn't believe it was the same rotator. This has to be
the worst antenna system environment I've seen. It's almost as bad as EA8 or
some of those places where the hardware only lasts for a year or so. 

Cheers,  Steve  K7LXC

Champion Radio Products
http://www.championradio.com

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