I did spend some more time in the lathe today. To avoid needing to redesign the 40m Yagi for the new element-boom plates I decided to isolate all elements from the, thus making the mechanical design irrelevant since I don’t know how much the guy struts etc will affect the performance. So I did make some wider ones for the driven element and a bit more narrow ones for the other elements.

Now I need to get hold of some materials until the weekend and I can hopefully build the whole beam except the smaller dimension tubing (< 32mm) since I will need to take them up to work and use the lathe to make them fit properly. But everything else should be built during my soon to come vacation. [nggallery id=151]

I’ve done some work in the lathe while its been slow or too hot in my office. I did some transitions from 50mm tubing to 32mm tubing for the 3el 40m Yagi which is one of the current projects. I also milled some center insulators for SM0W @SK0UX who is converting the CUE DEE gamma matches to hairpin like I’ve done on all our beams. I also found some picture of the stub filter I did earlier for 10m and some welding I did for my brother when I was on vacation home at the old SM3 QTH (my parents place).

Next I need to get hold of some material to make the boom-to-element plates and the boom support strut, unfortunately the place I usually go and find scrap things from have vacation, so I need to find some other place.

I also did some bug searching in the openASC software and managed to get rid of one bug plus also add a new feature. I will start working on the rotator software too, so I can start converting my rotators to be controlled by the openASC device.

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Me and SM2NOG went on a 1800+ km trip during a few days. We intended to go down to SM0 with Gus (SG3P, owner of SK3W) to pickup some aluminum we ordered together (240kg to SJ2W) and also go by SK0UX to pickup some other stuff donated by SM0W and SM0DZB. We went down on Thursday mid day with a Volvo 244 and the plan was to swap cars at my parents place and use my dads newer VW Golf TDI but after 60km in the car the turbo quit on us, so we just hooked off the trailer and went back and the rest of the trip was done with the 30 year old trusty Volvo 244.

On the way down we had 4 pcs of K-600 tower sections which the SK3W gang didn’t get on their trailer during their visit a couple of weeks back. The trip went well and we arrived at SK3W around 0200. The plan to was head to SM0 early on Friday morning so we only got a couple of hours sleep before heading off again in SM3XIK’s V8 Jeep, which had an easier time with than trailer than the old Volvo. We picked up the 300kg of aluminum and went for lunch and after that we headed up to SK0UX, which is a superb hilltop QTH where SM0W and SM0CXU (PY2ZXU) met us and gave us the tour. Teemu (SM0W) also gave us some connectors and 80m of 1/2″ coax that I will use up to the 6el 10m Yagi which we will put in the 60m tower.

We also went by SM0DZB who gave us a tour of his country side vacation home where we also picked some fun stuff.

On Friday afternoon we headed back to SK3W and had a nice time with some BBQ and also spent Saturday there. I helped Gus a bit with some openASC problems which we managed to solve while SM2NOG, SM3XIK and SG3P did build some shelves for the aluminum Gus bought for SK3W.

Big thanks to the SK3W gang for the hospitality and to SM0W/SM0CXU for the tour of SK0UX.

Also huge thanks to SM2NOG who drove us down there 🙂

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Aluminum has been ordered for the projects this summer. Planned is to build a 3el Yagi to complete the stack in the 60m tower, also 2x2el Yagis for 40m plus to build another 5el mono for 20m to add to the 5el we have to make it a 5/5el stack. A total of almost 200kg!

Thanks to the people involved in SJ2W who helped to pay this order. And special thanks to SM2DMU/SM2HTF very generous contribution which paid for half of it!