SM2XJP took a few pictures with his cellphone camera of the tower in the dawn. Looks pretty nice with its bright red light :)Thanks Peter!

Since I was alone at the shack for a few days I spent that time doing some of the work which can be done alone. I pulled four rotator cables from the house to the switch room, pulled 7/8″ cable to the 16m tower and also added some connectors to the cables (RG-17) running from the basement to the switch room.

Here is what was done…

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As has been seen on the homepage I have been working on rebuilding the matching system of the beams I have which is currently gamma. I installed a new hairpin system on one of the 10m beams and we put it up in the small 16m tower that was temporarily holding the 3el yagi for 20m. We had trouble at first to get any proper readings of the matching system but after adding an RF choke that problem was removed and we got some decent measurements. However the system is currently resonating too low so we will need to try to trim it in a bit more.

Here are pictures of the finished system and the installation of the 10m beam. The Antenna is at around 15-16m and another 6el will be positioned at 5-6m below the top one. We tested the old gamma match first to check bandwidth etc before we installed the hairpin.

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The weekend is over. We had a great time on Saturday when around 20-25 people showed up for the field day at the QTH. My favorite visitor was the 2 year old female dog (Owner is mr and mrs CUE DEE, SM2DMU & SM2HTF) but also the others were nice to talk with. It was fun to see the faces of all the people one has heard on the 2m repeater during the last year of having this QTH.

Before the field day event I started to work on the rebar “cage” for the concrete base to the 60m tower. It is a bit more work to do though before it is finished. Hopefully we get to borrow a tractor soon so that we can fill up the guy wire anchor holes but also so that we get some gravel and sand here needed for mixing the concrete.  After that is done we are pretty much ready to raise the first sections of the 60m tower.

With help from SM2LIY we took down some more trees surrounding the 60m tower. All bigger trees that are within the reach of the tower or guy wires are taken down. Not only does it make it impossible for them to cause damage to the tower, it also opens up my land a bit which looks really nice. It is still just a little bit of the land that we remove trees from, there is plenty left.

Here are some pictures

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