Recovery from the two lightning strikes to my tower is nearly complete. Over the past few weekends, we were able to get the Cushcraft XM-240, 4 element SteppIR, Prosistel PST 61D and Icom IC-746 back on the air. It was a sizable effort (with many thanks to Dave/KIØQ for the tower work and others like [...]
Another evening of working on restoring my Prosistel PST 61D. After removing the MOVs from the potentiometer, I plugged the rotator into the control box on the bench. I could turn the rotator clockwise and counterclockwise, but the readings were not accurate. Time to plug the controller into my laptop and find out if there [...]
We spent all day on Saturday taking down the rotator, antennas and assessing the damage done by lightning to my amateur radio station. In short, Dave (KIØQ) spent much of the day on the tower and Rick (N0CFL), my father-in-law, XYL and I worked ground crew.
Weather was nearly perfect (no wind, ~82 degrees) and [...]
Tower survives high winds
One hot & muggy summer afternoon, I was driving home when a major storm hit central Iowa. My daughter’s school, a mere mile away from my house, recorded 80+ MPH winds before the weather station was blown off of the roof!
The good news is that my tower and antennas did not [...]
After last season’s pathetic performance on 160 and 80 meters, it’s time to figure out what to do to replace the AlphaDelta DX-B half-sloper. The half-sloper design is questionable and is highly dependant upon many variables that differ from site to site (tower height, antennas, mast, sloper height, angle, etc.). I had low expectations for [...]
Brandon, KF6SWL, wrote me in March to ask if he could have a high resolution copy of one of my amateur radio tower pictures. He saw one that he liked on my ham radio tower project pages. He said that he needed this for his wedding plans! You see, Brandon was planning his groom’s cake. [...]
I’ve created a new section of the website to document the ham radio tower project. By no means is this meant to be a “How-to Build a Ham Radio Tower” website. I do not claim to be an expert and strongly urge anyone attempting to build a ham radio tower to follow manufacturer’s guidelines.
However, [...]
An update on my Prosistel direction alignment issue. After emails with ArraySolutions and Prosistel, I’m now properly aligned.
The problem
Just to recap what I was seeing… I had the rotor installed and antennas pointed to 000 (North). After some work (another trip for poor Dave up the tower to reset the stack) everything lined up. [...]
Here is a tip for installing and aligning a Prosistel (BigBoy) PST-61D rotator… Set the rotor control box to a known setting prior to installing your antennas. Unfortunately, I did things a bit backwards. In my case, we cabled and tested the rotor and controller on the ground (makes sense). We installed the rotor on [...]
After years of planning, buying, building, cabling, interfacing and testing, I was finally have an operational ham radio station on the air in a contest once again. Friday night was spent working on the trench for the most part. The coax, control cables (SteppIR and Prosistel Rotor) and extra pull ropes were fed through [...]
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