SJ2W Contest Station

Here is an update from the last two weeks at SJ2W. I’ve done some various work and pretty much gotten the room downstairs for the operators to sleep in. I also made a major cleaning of the kitchen and added a new kitchen table I got donated from a friend. Next is to clean the room where I sleep and move the desk I have there downstairs so I can get my office down there and maybe get some order in my bedroom as well. Right now it’s just a big pile of stuff in there.

I also got new electricity into the barn so now I have a 3-phase outlet there and all electricity in the barn will be routed to the new fuse box instead.

A welding cart was started to be fabricated because I am very tired of needing to carry all stuff out every time I need to weld. The welder isn’t heavy but now I will make a cart with shelves etc where I keep all welding equipment so its all in one place and easily moveable.

SM2XJP also mounted a hitch on his car, so now it will be easier when we need to transport things and not needing to borrow a car with a hitch. I can’t understand in the beginning why cars are being sold without them 🙂 Don’t everybody need to move a tower from time to time?

I have also re-routed my plans a bit for this summer. Now the focus will be trying to get the Moskojärvi 60m tower up this summer and get the 30el 15m stack operating so I am trying to sort all things out regarding this.

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We had holiday on Thursday and Friday was also a day off work. So I took out 3 vacation days so I could spend over a week down at the station. I went to Skellefteå where they had a little ham fest and met up with SM2UVU and SM2XJP. We went to SJ2W afterwards and spent the afternoon out in the nice weather having a nice time. The weather during the week varied quite a bit, sometimes very nice and sunny while other occasions we had heavy rain and lightning storms. I managed to get quite a lot done though, both on some radio projects but mainly on the house. SM2LIY spent most of the week there with me and worked a lot of ES on 6m and also helped to measure the guy wires from the Moskojärvi tower.

We also had a visit from Tore, SM0DZB and Johan, SA5BJM on Sunday. They had been to Bastuträsk and bought a tower + antennas and some cables and were on their way home. So SM2XJP fed them and I gave Johan som aluminium left from the Moskojärvi takedown since he will be building a lot of antennas in the near future for his tower project (the K-600 tower we took down for him).

SE2T showed up on Friday and mixed concrete with me so we finally got the operators room in the basement done and I also managed to get a new door + insulation etc on the house so now that project is getting close to being completed. SA2BRJ also showed up on Friday and had some flat monitors with him and had also cut out SJ2W in styrofoam to be put up on the wall in the shack, very nice indeed! I also constructed some concrete forms to make our own guy wire anchors for the inband tower and one of the guy wire sets for the new 60m Moskojärvi tower. I believe I will buy the guy wire anchors for the outer set of wires (top two levels) just so I sleep better at night knowing those are manufactured by the book, even though I believe the ones I make myself should be adequate.

On Sunday some friends of SM2XJP showed up. He’s been talking to them on the radio for years and they decided to make a visit to Sweden. These two English gentlemen were Neil, M0SHF and Allan, M3AFF. They spent the Sunday with us and we did eat good food (cudos to SM2LIY BBQ skills) and had fun and they even managed to work some QSOs as well.

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SM2XJP gave me a ride down from the work QTH last Friday since I had gotten my new Miller MIG welder that I just bought. It is nice to have a MIG welder since it saves a lot of time compared to welding with stick. This is also a 240A welder so I can weld pretty thick material with it.

I did some welding to test the new welder out and modified a couple of tables I had gotten previously from work. I got some help as well from SM2XJP with the paneling on the house which we removed and then it was the task of battling the horrible insulation material. I can only say my condolences to the people who had to work with this crap some 50 years ago. If you have not dealt with it, then its very hard to explain how horrible it is. Each of these pieces of insulation is cut on the bottom and top so you have fibers of glass pouring out of it and it does fly everywhere and lands all over you. But now finally the last piece of it is down from the house! Now we just need to get rid of it…which means transporting it to the local dump.

Tomorrow I am heading down to the radio QTH again and will spend over a week there, so I expect to get a lot done.

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