[TowerTalk] Universal 50 tower

[Patrick Greenlee]

Larry, I did similar to you and it works pretty good but as the tower is 
insulated and driven as a vertical I made my arrangement removable so as 
to avoid coupling problems (issues for the under 40 crowd.)

I used a 10 ft galvanized steel fence post and welded a pipe nipple to 
it that screws in to a threaded pipe coupling that stays in place.  When 
I want to lay the tower down I just screw in the post, hook up the back 
guy, attach the winch cable to the tower, disconnect 2 of the 4 guys on 
the tower and crank it down.  The post is 4 inch diameter and easily 
handles the loads.  Just to be extra safe I found another 
"post/pipe/whatever 5 ft long that was a slip fit and put it inside at 
the location of maximum buckling activity and plug welded it in 3 spots 
to hold it in place.

The tower associated with this fixture is a Hy-Gain Hy-Tower which is a 
tapered triangular lattice tower up to the 24 ft height and telescoping 
aluminum tubes from there to 52-3 ft.  I walked it up, once but never 
again.  It isn't that easy with two guys in the 6' plus height bracket 
weighing in at 215-220lbs.  Doing it alone was hard to do and not too 
bright of me.  This installation is not ground mounted in a cubic yard 
of concrete but instead is on the roof of an all metal barn (no radials) 
where it performs well. Barn is 37x73 ft and 18'6" eave height with low 
pitch gable roof and makes a good counterpoise.

Of course, if the tower to be raised/lowered is heavier, taller, has 
heavy antenna atop it, etc. then the raise/lower fixture should be 
taller in proportion.  As I have it now the cranking takes a while but 
is not too challenging with down being trivial and up a minor workout.

Patrick   NJ5G


On 1/14/2015 7:03 AM, Larry Stowell wrote:
> I couldn't agree more that last 20 30° is very uncomfortable.
> What I did is got two sections of used 25G mounted it with a homemade
> mount on the same block of concrete that the universal was on back
> guyed it, added a pulley at the top and bought a hand winch and mounted
> it at the bottom I don't have a large antennas on it and a rotor and 
> 10 foot
> aluminum mast. It works quite well.
>
> 73 Larry K1ZW
>
> ------------------------------
>