SJ2W Contest Station

I made a little video of me climbing the new Moskojärvi 60m tower this weekend. Ground crew while I was climbing were SM2UVU and SM2XJP. I did get fatigued (probably too little water) after a few hours so SM2UVU ended up finishing the job. Here is a “little” video that is pretty long 🙂

Awesome weekend, we finally completed the erection of the tower we took down from Moskojärvi a couple of years ago. So now, the tower which is one year younger than me is finally up at a new location and ready to receive some new antennas.

I arrived to SJ2W already on Thursday and got a ride there by SM0W who was on a work tour up in the north. And another guy I do like very much joined him, PY2ZXU/SM0CXU who was visiting his sister up in Piteå which is not far from where I work. On Thursday and Friday we got the last preparations done to be able to lift the tower and on Saturday the 48 tonne crane arrived and made it out to the field over the grass. Guys who helped out were SM2XLL, SM2UVU, SM2NOG, SM0CXU, SM0W, SM2LIY and SM2RMG.

SM2XJP is going on a trip tomorrow Thursday down to SM3WMU to pick up some 5G2.5mm2 cable for the rotation of the Mosko-tower and also some control cable, 2×20 0.65mm2. He will also stop by SM2DJK and get some 1/2″ cables and an amplifier.

This weekend the plans are to get the 7/8″ coaxes up the tower, so when we get some antennas up in the tower they are ready to be connected at once. Plan is to first build one 6el yagi for 15m, hoist it up and check that it performs according to specs. If so, we will build the other 4 antennas and hopefully get them hoisted at the same time. Plan is that we should have the 15m stack working before SAC SSB which is the second weekend in October.

So many pictures that I don’t have the energy to put text on them, sorry about that.

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This weekend we had planned to lift the first 36m of the 60m high Moskojärvi tower. It all went great and as usual “GTL-Tobbe” did the job great with the small village crane. It was fun to have the new local hams with us for the first time during a tower lift, SA2CHQ and SA2CLC who live very close to SJ2W. SM2XLL also brought his friend Ulrik who was a big asset as well. I got a ride with SM2UVU who had been up in Kiruna for work and when we arrived at SJ2W Pelle, SM2LIY was already there. So we were a good bunch of people helping out and it just took one hour from when the crane came until we were done. During coffee afterwards SM2NOG showed up since he had gotten the idea we were going to lift the tower at 11 and not 9 🙂 SM2XJP also came by but by then the coffee pot was empty, however he got some nice burgers instead from chef SM2UVU.

We also discovered some issues with the 40m 4-SQ where the cable had been severely messed up by the forest machines a couple of years ago but we didn’t see it until now. I will need to replace parts of the cable. We also got problems again with the 7/8″ cable we had problems before last winter with ice in the connector and I guess there might still be water in the cable. So me and SM2XJP pulled through two new 7/8″ cables, one for the 5/5el 20m stack and the other for the soon to be 15m stack in the Moskojärvi tower.

I will try to book a bigger crane for next weekend so we can get the last of the tower up so it will reach its full height of 60m. SM2LIY took all the pictures and I also had a GoPro camera that did a time lapse of the work which can be seen below.

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Last week I did some preparations so we could hopefully lift the first 36m of the 60m tower the weekend after. Everything went great but it was a bit hard to lay out the tower sections by myself but I managed. On Sunday all the sections were bolted together and the guy wire lines were in place and we could head north again to do another week of work.

I also made some drilling templates for 25 and 20mm tubing. I will use these to drill the holes in all aluminum tubes so that they fit together properly and is quick to build. I will try to get them heat treated so they don’t get “eaten” up by the drill too fast.

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