2017 goal: antenna tower up again!

Remember my yearly post "higlights and goals" from december last year. Well last summer I finally had time to apply for a antenna tower building permit. But things are going slow in our country so it took almost half a year before I finally got it. And if you think that's all, well when you get the building permit you need to wait for 6 weeks before it is official so any neighbours can make official complaints. But finally the mast is up again now since last saturday, the only goal I had for the hobby this year. I did some work on the winches and bought new clamps to fasten the cables. To mount the rotor and antennas on top will take a while. I decided to sell the Create rotor and take a look at the Kenpro KR600 again. Probabely the Kenpro needs a new potmeter as well.





Then last sunday I opened the "Electron". Which is the

monthly magazine from the VERON (Dutch hamradio organisation). One of the articles was about the PA-beker contest. A dutch national contest which I always participate in. I took a view in my agenda, it was not in! How could this be? I don't know but this contest happens upcoming weekend. I have no time to make any NVIS antenna this week. No time to install the 80m loop like I always did in previous years. Luckely I still had my old 80m loop copper wire (not the most recent) and figured out I could make a 80m band inverted-Vand mount it in the new tower. But how to feed it as I haven't got enough coax. No time to tune a antenna either and no time to construct a ladder line. So I've been searching around in my garage and found 4 pieces of 400 Ohm ladderline wich I soldered together so it was just enough to get from my shack to top of the "new" antenna tower. It seems to be working fine at least on the 80m band the signals are strong and compared to the old vertical noise is much less. It seems to have a narrower band width compared to the loop but tunes fine on all bands including 160m!