Today the wasp war continued. This time I think I finished them off using three dl of gasoline into each hole and smoked them out. After that I dug the hole up and filled it back with gravel and sand. So hopefully the war is won but we will see.

SM2XLL came by and helped me to finish up the WARC beam so after he left it was pretty much ready to be tuned. I spent the rest of the day making a boom strut for the 40m 3el Yagi which is in the process of being built. I am quite pleased with how it came out and I really like using square tubing instead of round ones, makes it a lot easier to cut and get the welds nice. Now I need to clean it off and paint it and start building the boom for the Yagi.

SM2LIY arrived in the evening and after some BBQ we hoisted the beam into vertical position with the reflector down and tuned it up. We didn’t need to adjust it anything on 17m but on 12m we had to adjust the hairpin a bit to get a proper match. The beam is not designed to sit in the 60m tower, but it did fit when turning the beam about 30 degrees off, giving it enough room to have a few cm between the elements and tower. So that is the reason why its not pointing exactly as the other beams. The first tests seem very promising and the first QSO was ZP6CW followed by D2CQ.

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Now I have another two weeks of vacation and all the time will be spent at SJ2W. I arrived yesterday with my girlfriend after we had been shopping some iron material for boom struts etc, but also a wood splicer (if that is what they are called) since my girlfriend loves to do that and I hate it, its a perfect match.

I also had war against wasps. On Thursday evening I got stung five times at two different occasions. Once it was when opening one of the doors to the barn, some wasps had built a nest on the door and they attacked me which caused three bites. Later when I was mowing the lawn I got stung two times more. So this created a war between me and the wasps. I first manage to tear down their nest, which I later sprayed with paint and I will continue to do this until they are all gone and I can enter the room again. Later when attaching the winch to the 60m tower I discovered another nest, but this time the kind in the ground. So I poured 1 liter of oil into it and plugged it closed with a stick. Hopefully I have won the war, but we will see if they are still trying to get in tomorrow and if that is the case I’ll use more spray.

Since I am using the work table for the wood splicer I had to build a new work table. I found an old thing in the barn which had wheels, so I modified it and attached a board onto it, so now I have a table which is easier to move and bigger. I’d like to protect the board with some sheet metal, but I don’t have any right now but might to get hold of some.

Tomorrow I plan to finish up the WARC beam, tune it and get it into position in the 60m tower under the first guy ring. Plan is to move it to another tower in the future, but I don’t know when I will be able to get that up.

I will try to update the web page a lot now when I have vacation, so stay tuned!

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