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.
