[TowerTalk] LP v SteppIR

[jimlux]

Doug Turnbull wrote:
> Buddy, Everything you say seems pretty sensible to me.   Thunderstorms are
> not muck of a problem in EI land but I wonder if Florida operators have much
> trouble with SteppIR. You can always retract all the elements when not using
> the SteppIR. One does wonder how the SteppIR will hold up after ten years.
> Thank you for your insights.
>                   73 Doug EI2CN 
> 


A very valid point about expected lifetime, particularly in the ham 
world where people are used to using 50 year old radios.

20 years is a long time for an electromechanical system to last without 
maintenance, and if that system happens to be up a 100 foot tower... 
(Does your washing machine last that long?  If you bought it in the 60s 
or 70s, probably, but if you bought it in the last 10 years, probably not)

That said, one doesn't hear lots of stories about "worn-out" SteppIRs, 
and they've been out about 10=15 years, haven't they?  So one should 
start hearing about it.

You hear about blown up controller boxes for one reason or another; 
weather damage (not lightning, but wind/ice, it seems), etc.  The 
weather damage is probably no different than conventional aluminum 
antennas, except that the usual Yagi will keep working if the elements 
are bent (judging by the antennas I see adjacent to the freeways, more 
than half of all hams with beams have at least one element more than 15 
degrees out of plane), so the non-SteppIR does have a "fail-soft" 
degraded mode of operation.

There are complaints of motor/mechanism failures, but they're fairly 
infrequent, and, to be fair, you hear complaints about conventional 
antennas with broken traps, incorrect hardware, etc.  And, because 
they're new and novel, the "reporting rate" on SteppIR problems is 
higher than for conventional antennas (e.g. you're more likely to find 
an online comment about a SteppIR problem than about a missing set of 
clamps in some other antenna)

If the "not-perfect" rate is below, say, 1%, I'd say it's pretty good. 
We're not launching spacecraft to Mars after all.  For the Fluidmotion 
guys to drive the failure/DOA rate to 0.001% or something would drive 
the price up to where nobody would buy them.