Today was tower raising day. A crew with a lift arrived at about 8am. First challenge of the day was to get the lift into the back yard - not an easy task when your fence gate has an 8 ft opening and the lift is 8 ft 2 in wide. Solution? Remove a [...]
Tuesday night at about 5:45pm Dave (KIØQ) called and wondered if we could work on the tower. Dave said he could be at my QTH by 6:30pm. I figured that Dave could help me position the tower sections such that I could then take a day off of work and bolt the sections of the [...]
Ham radio tower plans are progressing and the concrete foundation for the ANWireless HD-70 has been curing for 15 days now. While waiting, I’ve been working on ordering lightning protection equipment, cable, etc.
I’ve learned that the gear from ICE is in demand. I needed to order several surge protection devices and the only place [...]
Considering several aspects of the 4 element SteppIR controller cable today… lightning protection/SPG, burying it along with the coax in PVC, etc. As it turns out, because I’m having to route around the septic field, the 175ft of 16 conductor SteppIR controller cable won’t be long enough.
So, I’ll need to order a 16 conductor line [...]
Thinking a bit more about running coax to the tower. In an earlier post, I described the general plan for grounding. That hasn’t changed much, but over the noon hour today I went to the local Menards to investigate PVC coupling options and copper (no cheap sources yet) to use as ground straps (roofing flashing might [...]
With the tower foundation in place and curing in the Iowa summer sun, it’s time to think about the antenna system. Topping the mast (~83′) will be the Cushcraft XM-240 which is a two element “shorty forty” monoband antenna for 40 meters. Beneath that (at about 73′) will be the SteppIR 4 element yagi [...]
Technorati Tags: ham radio tower, coax, grounding, ground rod, antennas
After a long day of tower foundation work, I placed an order for coax and connectors from CableXperts. The coax was 650′ of their CXP1318FX (their flexible version of LMR-400-UF which is the size of RG8/U). Big advantages of this coax for my installation will be [...]
We poured concrete yesterday. A lot of concrete. Most of it was for the ham radio tower - but we also poured a basketball court and patio. (My lawn mower will wonder what happened to all that grass!)
The first task of the day was to ensure that the base section was properly aligned and secure prior to the [...]