Monthly Archives: August 2012

House work almost done

Posted by sm2wmv on August 28, 2012 Comments Off

The work on the house is almost done for this year. Left to do is some painting but then it will have to wait until next year before we do the last side of the house. Now it will be all radio from now on this year! I am still hoping that we might get the 40m tower up, it would be a huge help if we just had it up even if not rotatable, so we could fix a yagi for 20 and 40m towards east. That would make us a lot more flexible, so that will be the goal for this autumn.

For the weekend of 8-9th of September we’ve planned to take down a 60m tower which is located up north outside of Gällivare. It is a tower which was put up in 1985, so its 10 years older than my 60m tower and built by OH8QD. It seem to be in very good shape and if weather allows, we might have it down on Sunday the 9th of September. SG3P (SK3W) is coming up to help along with SM2NOG, SM3JLA and SM2XJP.

If this goes well we will know what our big project for next year will be…

SM2LIY was also joining us at the QTH last weekend and spent some time in the forest putting up 500m of RG-6 to a vertical which will be used for inband listening. We did some early tries with his IC-7400 as receiver and it seem to work quite well. However I think it would work even better with a radio which has got better IMD performance (maybe a good roofing filter), so I will make some tests with the MKV as RX and compare. Plans are to add a new radio to the shack in the future, and it will probably either be another MKV or a TS590. The preamp seem to work well, but I’ve got some idea of maybe making another type and use just to compare, but we will see…

Hopefully our major amplifier problem has also been solved, but I’ll get back to that in a future post when things are final.

Pictures were taken by SM2XLL

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A little update

Posted by sm2wmv on August 22, 2012 2 comments

Last weekend some more things got done at SJ2W. On Friday me and SM2XJP paid SM2DMU a visit. We picked up a bearing which is used as a guy wire ring. He used it on one of his towers but unfortunately it fell down a few years ago and one of the rings was left over since the parts of the tower that weren’t damaged, was enough to be guyed at one level. Thus we could take it and I will drill a few new holes in it to match our current tower. So we thank Rainer a lot for giving us that guy wire ring along with 10 pcs of M12 A4 stainless steel threaded rods.

I also noticed that when I drilled 15mm holes in the H-beams it was too small. I thought it was M14 but unfortunately it was M16, so now I have taken them up to work again where I will drill the holes bigger so it fits properly.

I also got some work on the house done and hopefully in a couple of weekends it will be done for this year and it will be all radio work from now on.

I left my phone at SJ2W, so I might be hard to get in touch with until Friday when I will be back. That also means no pictures, since I use the phone to take them.

Today I built a preamp with a GALI-74+ amplifier from mini-circuits. It seem to work well, about 24dB amplification and according to the specifications it should have 2.7dB Noise-Figure and IP3 of +38dBm. That is specified at 1 GHz though, I am not sure what we can see at 1-30 MHz, but hopefully it works well. I have also gotten all the 500m of RG-6 that I ordered so now we will put up a vertical about 600m from the TX antennas and see how much QRM we get when listening on the same band as the run station.

To be continued…

House and grounding

Posted by sm2wmv on August 11, 2012 Comments Off

Here are some pictures from last weekend when me and the girlfriend worked on the house. She did the painting while I was working on the house. On Sunday SM2XJP showed up and helped out to do a lot of hammering so now the only things left to do is to move the windows out, the details around the windows and paneling above and under the windows, so the big work is finally done.

I bought a tent which was pretty OK for the price, and after a roll of isolation tape its even pretty good. This way I can work outside with welding etc even if its raining and it was also a big help when painting.

I also did attach the guy wires to the grounding system.

(Sorry for the bad quality on the pictures)

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Progress on the tower base

Posted by sm2wmv on August 11, 2012 Comments Off

I’ve done some progress on the tower base lately. A few of the pictures below are old but they were taken by SM2XJP and they are quite nice, so I thought I’d add them. I also did drill all the holes needed in the H-beams for mounting them to the bearing. It went pretty ok, we’ve got quite good tools at work but I needed to buy a 28mm drill since we didn’t have such a big one.

Now I will transport them down to SJ2W next weekend and test if they fit as they are supposed to. If they do I will weld it.