Ham Radio - A contact sport

I managed to get the SteppIR 4 element yagi built yesterday and today I added the truss systems to the SteppIR and Cushcraft XM240. Additionally, this afternoon with the help of my neighbor, we were able to get a trench for the coax/pvc. Fortunately, central Iowa had a picture perfect October day today as far as weather goes… and after several days of rain, the trenching work went fast.

Here’s a few photos of the SteppIR construction process…

The SteppIR 4 element is a 81 lb beam that ships in two cartons (three including the controller cable). I opened the boxes for inventory and to run through initial setup in the garage.

Here you can see some Noalox (aluminum anti-oxidant compound) between two sections of the SteppIR boom. I’m not planning to take this thing apart any time soon, but just in case, Noalox should help allow for the antenna boom sections to come apart. I also used a generous amount when building the XM240 40 meter yagi.

Here is the wiring connection for the SteppIR controller. With the 4 element SteppIR, a 16 conductor controller cable is required. Some may argue that this added complexity and potential for failure makes the SteppIR a poor choice. After all, there is a potential for connector or cable failure on the antenna controller, potential for failure in the SteppIR motors themselves, etc.

The way I look at the SteppIR 4 element yagi antennas is that this antenna is actually a mono-band 4 element antenna for each band that I’m going to use. It’s a 4 element yagi on 10 meters, a 4 element yagi on 12 meters, a 4 element yagi on 15 meters, a 4 element yagi on 17 meters and a 4 element yagi on 20 meters.

There are other ways to get four element monoband antennas… many separate monobanders or a few multiband antennas (Optibeam, Force 12, etc.) - but the trade off is mechanical complexity with many elements in the air.

Here is the completed SteppIR. After installing the elements, I plugged in the control box and ran the tests. Thankfully, I had installed the control cable properly and all tests passed.

Overall, the assembly of the SteppIR was not too bad. It took longer than I had thought it would and there were times where the documentation could have been more clear. Here’s a hint for installing your own 4 element SteppIR… they continually update the documentation and the latest version is much better than the version you may have.

Today I finished the trusses for the antennas and then went onto the trenching. My neighbor, Chris, asked when I wanted to put the trench in at about 3 pm. We rented a trencher and had it basically done by 4:30pm.

We then returned the trencher and finished up with hand shoveling around the septic lateral lines (we were very careful around those lines). Finally, we started putting together the PVC until we’d lost daylight and were too sore to go any further.