I got a call on Thursday from SM2LIY who was at the QTH and said that the 40m yagi had tilted 90 degrees. This made me very depressed and I called SM2XJP so he could go out there and check if everything seem to be ok and it was just a matter of “twisting” it back and tighten the clamps. He called back a few hours later and confirmed that everything looked OK which made me a bit more calm.

I arrived at the QTH on Friday when it was dark, so I could not see the mess myself and started to do other work instead. I had gone to SM2EKM and picked up the SB220 he borrowed me to use on the 2nd radio during CQWW SSB that I plan to do SOAB HP as SJ2W. When I connected the amp and started it up it did blow the fuse and the anode current meter getting floored. This made me very scared but I was confused since I had handled the amp with care. So I checked to see if the tubes were properly in the sockets since I suspected maybe some glitch making it not “cut off”. I moved the tubes a bit and started it again and the amp was running, so I thought the problem was solved. Until I stepped upp from the chair which apparently made the table move slightly and bang the fuse went again. This made me very confused and I started to look at the tubes and did notice that the anode in the tube was lose and at some angles it did hit the cathode creating a shortcut. This made me very upset thinking I broke the tube so now I was not just nervous to climb the tower on Saturday morning but also the call to SM2EKM to tell him I broke his amp.

On Saturday morning I had a hard time eating anything because I was really nervous for the tower climb, for some strange reason since I’ve done it many times before without problems. I just had one of those days where I didn’t feel like doing it but I did pull myself together and climbed the tower mid day on Saturday. It went pretty easy but I avoided looking up since I could see some ice in the tower at some points, like where antennas were attached to the tower. However nothing fell and after I climbed up I broke the ice loose and threw it down, so that it wouldn’t hit me on my way down. Well in the top of the tower everything went very smoothly. I loosened the clamps more and with help of the boom support I could turn the yagi back. However the elements look worse aligned than compared to when we put the beam up, so I am afraid that it might twist even more this winter but hopefully it will survive as long as possible and we can fix it in the spring/summer.

When this was finished and I had gotten down to the ground again I called SM2EKM and told him what happened and he said “But Mikey, you should know that I have lots of tubes” so he will send two new tubes with me down to replace the ones in the amp now. So I had been nervous over nothing, both when it came to the tower climb as well as the call to SM2EKM 🙂 Thanks Jim!

After this was done SM2XJP and I did some work down at where the 40m 4-SQ will be placed but after a few hours we pretty much gave up. The snow makes it too hard and we don’t really have time to do everything to get the 4-SQ up before the ground will get rock hard and even getting rid of all the trees and branches is a big job. So this will need to wait until the spring/summer to be done. I am considering putting up a loop with apex @18m vertically polarized as EU antenna for 40 to use when beaming some other direction with the beam.

Here are some pictures taken by gf Anna!

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