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)
