[Towertalk] First day at Dayton

[K7LXC@aol.com]

Howdy, TowerTalkians --

    It was nice running into some of you today at the Hamvention. First the 
good news.

    Interesting new stuff including seeing the new AN tower at the Array 
Solutions booth. It's a commercial grade self-supporter. Pretty brute stuff 
and should take any kind of load like a 10' microwave dish which it looks 
like it was designed for.

    The owner of Pro-Sistel was also at the A/S booth. Very nice and sincere 
guy so his relationship with Array Solutions may be successful for everyone. 

    Also in the A/S booth was the designer and a version of the OptiBeam. It 
sounded interesting. It'd be nice if someone were to test one of them and 
publish the results. 

    Rich, K0XG, was there with his rotating tower products and he pointed out 
that he has a beam boom mount that'll fit on a 45G or 55G tower leg. It also 
has a strut that prevents any beam movement so the torque on the leg is 
minimized but the strut allows fine tuning so you can get the antenna pointed 
in the desired direction accurately and easily. 

    The K3LR Antenna Forum had REALLY interesting programs by K1ZM on his new 
VY2/Prince Edward Island station that has his dream 160M vertical set-up. 
Mike, W9RE, had the story of his 2L 80M beam. It's big, it's heavy, and they 
designed/homebrewed the whole thing. They even assembled it on the tower 
since the soil was too wet for a crane. VERY impressive. 

    The bad news is that the Hamvention continues its attendance slide. You 
can get a room anywhere in town right now including the Crown Plaza which is 
a first. The Hertz rental place at the airport said rentals were down 40% and 
you could walk right into the Spaghetti Warehouse across the street from the 
CP on Friday night and get seated immediately - that's NEVER happened before. 

    The wx is also crappy - rain and 50 degrees.

    More news tomorrow. I'll hit the flea market (2-1/2 acres!) then but will 
have to buy an umbrella first. 

Cheers,
Steve     K7LXC
TOWER TECH