[TowerTalk] Steppr Monstr plus ...

[Al Williams]

It is quiet on towertalk and I have several related items that I think will be of interest to some of you?

First, I met a newly licensed ham recently who had never made a qso.  But he is very enthusiastic and has an xyl ham also.  He came over to visit and when I told and showed him my Steppr that was still in boxes in the garage, he volunteered to help put it together and up on my LM470.
Well, it turned out that he is a retired mechanical engineer and was far better than me at understanding the assembly instructions and actually took charge and I wound up helping him.  Moral of this is that we often think of us helping the NEWBIES, but they may be helping us.

Second, in order to get the benefit of a lower angle of radiation I had purchased a 2 element Steppr that I wanted to mount between the Monstr at the top of the 70' tower and ground.  This NEWBIE designed a "sidearm?" platform to bolt onto the top plates of the second section of the LM470.  We took it to a machine shop/ welding place who fabricated it.  It fit perfectly on the tower after drilling three holes in the tower plate.
Did the 2 element steppr work?  The rotator is mounted about a foot from the tower and I asked Fluidmotion to build the 2 element boom such that I could end mount it to the rotator.  It's cabling comes down on one side of the tower and the cabling for the Monstr comes down on the opposite side of the tower so there in interference.  The 2 element rotates about 250 degrees before coming close to the tower.  During the recent cw sweepstakes, we tried numerous time to qso with Alaska and Northwest territory without  success because of the constant pileup.
However, in both cases when we applied the 180 degree reversal with the Steppir we made the qso.  Others have given up on the idea of mounting a beam lower on a crankup because of cabling interference but the Steppir eliminates that problem.

Third, the NEWBIE planned how to raise the Steppr Monstr to the top of the LM470.  Here is how we did it.  We made a number of sub-assembles of the Monstr in the garage and then assemble the entire antenna on tables with one end of the boom directly under the tower top and the other end straight out from the tower.  We then tied the close end of the boom to the top end of the tower through a pulley with the rope going down to the bottom of tower.  We used the tilt winch to tilt the tower up pulling the Monstr up with it.  The far end of the boom was on a Nursery type wagon so as not to injure the element housing.  When the tower pulled the Monstr up, the wagon with the far end of the boom was pulled toward the tower.  The Monstr boom was pulled up about 30 feet to a point where we had previously determined that the boom would be at a 90 degree angle from the tower.  The boom was then securely anchored to stay fixed at this angle.  The tower rope at the bottom was then unloosened and the tower tilted back down until the tower mast was in line with the Monstr mast plate U bolts.  In about a minute or two we jiggled the Monstr and extended the tower mast through the U bolts.  It really worked well.  Of course we had to tighten the U bolts, attached and route the cabling by climbing about 15 feet up a ladder.

Again this plan was the NEWBIE'S!  Not only did we raise the Monstr fully assembled but the tower also had the 2 element fully assembled during all this too. 

k7puc