This weekend the plan was to borrow the L70 tractor from GTL which is the local company who has made all the excavation and we’ve borrowed the tractor before and they also put up the first 36m of the 60m tower. And as long as SM2XJP drives the tractor we don’t seem to have any problems to borrow it, since they know he can handle it very well. We also borrowed the long arm which made us able to lift 8.5m straight up in the air.

SM2XLL showed up and helped me put some extra wire support for the tower, as extra safety to ease the load of the tower during the first part of the lift. Just when we were about to start the lift SM3JLA showed up and could help us. We had to start over during the first attempt since we hooked the tractor arm a bit too high up on the tower. When we moved it 1m down it worked just fine and we were able to raise it rather quickly.

The plan was to put up the 5el CUE DEE monobander for 20m but I had underestimated the size of it, so when we started to look where to lift it from we realized that we needed to take down around 5 trees, and with 3 hours of daylight left to do the lift we felt it was not possible to make it in time. Considering it was just meant to sit there temporarily mainly for CQWW CW to make us more flexible, we just dissembled the antenna and put it away to hopefully get it up next year in the 40m tower. So this tower will stand without any antenna during the winter and get the WARC duobander next year plus the 6m beam.

Lots of pictures, most taken by my girlfriend Anna.

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Since the weather prediction was so good this weekend, except Sunday I decided to stay extra long at the QTH. Me and SM2LIY made the 40m beam ready to be lifted and we tuned it on Sunday, during quite windy weather but still not too windy to just lift the antenna for tuning. We hoisted it to about 20m above the ground during our measurements and after three attempts we had the beam VSWR dip where we wanted it. After that we attached mast to boom plates and made it all ready to be lifted.

SM3JLA showed up just over the day on Monday to help us. Also SM2XJP showed up as usual and helped us up with the beam. It all went very smoothly except I had to wrestle the beam in the tower since I remembered the width between the tower legs of being 400mm and not 450mm. This meant I had to move the driven element about 3cm so fit the boom/mast brackets and slide the boom inside the mast/boom plates since I had already attached one to the tower. But after 2.5h I was able to climb down again.

Next weekend if the weather allows, we will try to get the phase box up there to connect the stack so we can try it out. The phase box handles BIP/BOP and has an L-match matching the two 50 ohm antennas to 50 ohms. I have been thinking about making a new box in the future, which enables us to be able to just use UPPER/LOWER or BOTH, mainly just because I would like to be able to see the difference, not that I think it will be very useful.

However, according to HFTA and thanks to the statistic files N6BV sent me of SJ2W, the stack looks like it will be a real performer! Just check the HFTA plots of the 40m stack below and tell yourself. I have plotted the single beam at 60m, the stack and the stack out of phase.

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SM2LIY helped me this weekend to get the 10m Yagi up in the 60m tower at 46m height. We tuned the beam on Friday and had it ready for liftoff on Saturday morning. The local club SK2AU had planned a visit to SJ2W on 11:00 on Saturday, so we thought we would have no problem to be done in time for their arrival. But things took longer time as usual, since we decided to hoist the 1/2″ hardline (donated by SM0W) up the tower as well. So when I was hooking up the beam to the coax and attaching it to the tower they guys from SK2AU arrived. But I took my time and taped the coax up every m down the tower so now we just need to fit a connect in the bottom and attach the jumper cable between the cable post and tower.

It will be very interesting to see how well this beam works and to compare it with the 6/6el stack. I doubt that it will beat the 6/6 very often, but when there are marginal conds, sporadic E and during band openings/closings it should outperform the low stack. Also it adds a 2nd direction to the station, which is always good, especially now when 10m is finally showing some life again.

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