Saturday, October 12, 2019

Pre-winter antennawork in progress (2)

One last view on the summer
setup...
Well, the weather forecast was not really good for today but it was at least dry in the morning. I decided to dismantle all the antennas in my tower and change them for the HF vertical and the 10m 4 element LFA beam. The summer antennas are in the garage again now. Not shure if I will install the 6m beam next summer? I might try a 4m beam for a change, something I will decide next year when the ES-season is approaching.


First of all I was thinking about my CG3000 autotuner. You all remember what happened in june 2018 with all the water in my tuner, I don't want to have that again. Personally I do think it is condensation after all and the water formed over the years I got the tuner in the mast. So I drilled a small hole in the bottom of the tuner to ventilate the inside, to keep the water outside I mounted a small tube in the hole.


The tuner and the vertical have to be mounted isolated from the tower to perform well. So I needed to extend the antenna mounting tube. It took some effort but I managed to slam a glasfiber tube, I previously used for the 80m horizontal loop, into the top. I mounted the vertical and the tuner without any problems. After that the beam which I already prepared was mounted. It took time to route al the wires...

Now, I need to turn the tower up, rotate the antenna and turn the tower down again in order to mount the radial for the vertical. But unfortunately the weather changed as forecasted. Actually it kept raining...and raining. And when it got dark it was still raining. No further antennawork was possible. Have to wait till tomorrow...



So, now the tower is up and waiting...so far the SWR on the LFA is very good. I hope the vertical will be working as well as soon as it is ready tomorrow...hopefully the weather is better.


2 comments:

Photon said...

Well, you are going to do very good things with that LFA! I'm about to buy one, possibly two 144MHz versions...

PE4BAS, Bas said...

A LFA stack on 144MHz, wow! I hope that good things are happening for you. 73, Bas