HF Vertical installation

I have been very bad at keeping my blog alive and active.  Lots have been happening in EI9GTB land, not least all of the storm damage to my antenna systems.

As most of you know, my inverted V's for 40M & 80M were the first to come down in the strong winds.  There was no actual damage to the wire antenna's in fact it was just the wire tie that held the centre point to its hanging bracket.You would think that these could be easily repaired but with the winds so strong I could not lower the tilt over tower and with the ground being saturated, it was too soft to bring in a hoist. So no joy in getting these back up.......  but hey, not to worry, I still had my 7 ele tri-bander for HF!

It was not very long that the storms took their toll on my TH7DX and one half of the last element came crashing down, leaving the other half dangling precariously.

On top of this, the beam is rotating freely in the wind now, but otherwise all is well with the tower.

The IRST 80M counties contest is one which I really enjoy taking part in.  It was scheduled for New Years day 2014 but I now had no antenna what so ever that I could utilise.  I decided three days before the contest to drive as far as Coleraine in Northern Ireland to P&D CB and Amateur Radio Supplies, who very kindly opened up especially for me, and I purchased a new Hustler BT5V - 5 Band vertical antenna.  This would give me coverage on 80M, 40M, 20M, 15M, 10M, but I also purchased the 17M add on to this antenna.

So now I have an antenna that I can use for the contest.  All is well, right?  NO!

I assembled the antenna (without the 17M addition) and hastily erected it without any radials.  The instructions clearly state that this antenna will perform adequately without any radials (I guess I should not have read that part!).  Nothing!  I could hear everything, but the SWR on ALL bands was off the charts.  Devastated, I took the antenna down again and gave up on the contest for this year. :-(

So began my new project...... to erect the vertical HF antenna with a proper radial system.

I had a radial plate made for me by a very fine engineer in Drogheda (Pat Lynn, Fairgreen) and I bought some stainless steel nuts and bolts to fit.

 

Today (11th March 2014), I started on the mount for the antenna.  I needed to dig a big enough hole, square it off, build a wooden frame, mix concrete, pour concrete and centre 2" metal pole. Apparently a picture says a thousand words... get ready for my first novel!

(Sorry I can't get the photos to align as I want!)

So now I will wait for the concrete to set, I need to cut the pole to size and I can then mount my radial plate.  I have it ready with the nuts and bolts and I have most of my radials cut to size.  I still need to solder lugs on the end of my radials but I'll get to that over the next few evenings.

I have decided that I will start out with 4 radials for each band, each radial being a 1/4 Wavelenght.

I plan to have this finished and tested this coming weekend (St. Patricks) so that I can go on the air and make some new contact.

I will keep you updated as to how I am progressing.

Thanks for reading.

73 de EI9GTB (Brian)

OK!  So it has been a while since I last posted anything on my blog.  The main reason for this has been the decided lack of enthusiasm on my part.  With the run up to Christmas and working, I just found it difficult to motivate myself to post anything meaningful..... but here goes!

I have filled out and marked off, 000's of QSL cards for EI0W mainly but some for EI7DAR.  Some of these went back as far as 2005, so apologies to anyone who has been waiting for a return QSL card.  I should have the last of these cards filled out by then end of this year (still approx 1.5K to go!)and I will ship them all out together.

I also had my TH7 erected for the CQ WW SSB contest but then (and only then) discovered that the balun was not working.  This rendered the beam completely useless and I had to settle for entering the contest using only my Antron 99!!  I made just under 1000 QSO's for the weekend and entered the Single Op Unassisted High Power category.   Thus far, the CQ website has be placed as second in Ireland in this category.  Not bad for my first contest!

I ordered a new balun from Hy-Gain which arrived and was installed last week..  thanks must go to Jim, Thos, John, Declan, Seamus and Tony for their invaluable help in taking down the tower and replacing the balun.  I decided to go for the 4Kw rated balun even though I will never get near that amount of power going through it!!  So far so good, everything seems to be working well with the beam and I am looking forward to making some nice QSO's with it.

Finally, for those of you who are waiting on a QSL card from myself, I (with help) finished the design of my card and set it off for printing.

I will be sending out lots very soon hopefully!

So thats it for now.  I will try to keep the blog updated more often. 

73

TH7DX - Tri Band Beam

So, we finally got to working on the assembly of the TH7DX Tri Band beam.  After painstakingly stripping down all of the traps and elements, cleaning and greasing, and then reassembling them, we were in a position to look at the boom.

After examining the boom, we decided to replace all of the nuts and bolts as they were old and rusted.  We also replaced all electrical connections on the boom with new ones.

The boom was then cleaned up and moved to the open garden where we could attach the elements.

With the help of Thos (EI2JD) and Tony (EI4DIB) we carried the beam out onto the grass to start attaching the elements.  You can see in the picture that we have the boom support wires attached to a small pole to provide extra support for the boom.

So now we just need to attach the final elements, take a few measurements, adjust accordingly and then tighten everything up.



The rotator is setup in the shack and we spliced in the nearly 300' of control cable needed.  We have tested the rotator with the manual control box and with the software and it is working like a charm.  It is now a simple (!) matter of installing the rotator in the rotator cage on the tower, securing the control cable and then calibrating the rotator so that the stop position is somewhere in the south west direction.


Once the rotator is in place, we can then install the bearings and antenna pole in readiness for attaching the beam and the LMR400 coax.


So all in all its been a good week and hopefully we will have no problems raising the beam for use.  Hope to hear you on the bands.

73


A few more photos....

A productive day!

Today, Friday 21st September 2012, turned out to be a very productive day.

It started with a a quick clean up of the shack, throwing out useless junk and setting up the second workstation in the shack.

It then followed with lesson on how to properly use the FT-1000MP MK V by a very poorly but knowledgeable fellow (EI2JD).  Little did I know that I now have lots to learn!!

The day continued with a few tests of external HDD's, which, incidentally, all turned out to be dead.

We were surprised that we could not get the Antron to tune on 12M but no matter what we did it would not tune.  It  would tune fine on 10M, 15M and 17M.

I did manage to make a couple of QSO's on the 1000MP,  one into Europe and one VR2, both on the Antron 99.

I also hooked up my new Diamond Duplexer for 2M and 70CM.  I was delighted to hear the Dundalk repeater on 70CMs for the VERY first time!  I am looking forward to many QSOs on this new band in the future.

And to cap off the day (it being a beautiful day), we managed to put up Inverted V's for 80M & 40M - photo's will follow.  We clamped a small pole horizontally on the top of the tower and hooked the center of the Inverted V's to it.  On testing, it turns out that the Inverted V's were tuned for the CW portion of both bands.  I need to shorten the elements for SSB use.

I am delighed with how the day went and I still have two more days in this weekend!

73

EI9GTB

Stripping down the TH7DX

So, last weekend I finally got around to working on the TH7DX Tri-Band beam.  Thos (EI2JD) assisted and advised me on what I needed to do to strip each element down to clean all connections and also to strip down the traps to clean and inspect them.

So this image shows two elements with 15M and 10M traps.

 

This is the 10M trap before we stripped it down.

 

 

I have lots more to do and while the first one took quite a considerable amount of time, I suspect that stripping down all the elements, cleaning, gresing and re-assembling will take me some weeks.  Hopefully it will be worth it!

 

More to follow!

 

73



ERC Rotor Control & Rotator

So here is the ERC Rotor control unit hooked up to the Emotator rotaror.

It works a treat and is very easy to operate.  I have it working with a number of rotator control software applications including HRD and WinTest.  I now have to mount the rotator on the tower this coming weeknd and run the lenght of control cable back to the shack.

 

I have had a new bearing made for the rotator cage as the original one had pretty much seized.  The new bearing has bronze inserts which I am told will never sieze!

 

 

With a big of luck and good weather, I should have it all installed and ready for antenna installation this weekend.

 

73



ERC Rotor Control

Some images of the ERC-Rotor-Control Kit

 

Thanks to Oleg (EI7KC) for kindly putting it together and for testing it with my Emotator Rotator.  It is a very neat and tidy rotor control unit.  The rotator can be manually rotated by using the control box or it can be connected to your pc via usb to be automatically controlled by software.

 

The ERC Rotor Control kit costs just €69.00.