Today, James popped over and helped me shove a 16 foot lightweight pole into the top of the rotator on the tower. I attached a small video camera to the top of the pole.
It was quite funny because I couldn’t control the camera from the ground, so holding the pole horizontally at waist height, we focussed the camera on something far away and started recording - then the elaborate art of pole assembly was required to get the pole fitted to the rotator, start the generator engine and get the tower wound up to 40 feet - and do a 360 degree rotation before the time-out facility of three minutes shut the camera down!
The first time, instead of starting the film, I must have stopped it since all that effort and no film!
The second time, at least we got 270 degrees of rotation before the film stopped. Enough anyway to realise that 40 feet is genuinely high enough for some excellent 2.4gHz point-to-point stuff locally.
Great fun!
Later, I resigned the FT1000MP Yahoo Group and had a super QSO with my friend Arie, PA3A.
Cheers and beers,
Callum.
September 21st, 2008
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When the kids start to play less outside in the winter, I like to experiment with a new vertical each year. This year it’s a 12m spiderbeam vertical fibreglass pole loosely wound with some hard drawn copper wire. A waste pipe supplies the engineering for the radials with the SG230 doing the matching. This allows me 200w of SSB, in other words, a direct companion for a non-amplified 200w FT1000MP Mk5.
Thankfully, James (M3YOM [yomSOFT author]) popped around last Sunday to help me slide it into an old Barenco 2 inch coupler. This mounts on a steel 51mm outside diamter tube which in turn slides into a plastic mini-drain-pipe that has an internal diameter of 51mm from B&Q DIY store - all a perfect fit. I concreted the plastic pipe into the ground in June before the summer hols. It goes about a meter down. This means that unlike last year (http://www.m0mcx.co.uk/gallery/picture.php?/606/category/55) I don’t need any guys. It’s basically self-supporting.
In terms of its performance, it only really works well on 20m and 40m. The rest of the bands are a wash out but as a 5/8th vertical on 20m, I really am getting a couple of db gain over my other antennas. 15m band is comparable to my little super loop and modelling confirms this. 10m of course is hopeless because it’s longer than a wavelength. Until my 2 element SteppIR turns up, this will have to do.
In testing, I was lucky enough to discover a contest closing but with US stations keen to make a last for contacts on the 40m band. Clearly, it’s a winner there and the aerial allowed easy QSOs with a nuber of contest stations in the US. On 20m too, I scored with a number of US stations at around 21:30 local time on Monday eve when the band was still open. Since then, I’ve had lots of fun with it.
Lessons learned? None really. It’s a heck of a size for just two bands though and it sticks out like a sore thumb from all the streets around here since the top is sitting at just under 60 feet. Clearly last year’s version was also a 40m and 20m model but I didn’t realise that then. I did though speak to 23 countries on 160m. I’ll be interested if it still has any top band performance this year - or was that a fluke..?
73.
Callum.
September 19th, 2008
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I’ve finally sorted out 207 photographs from the 1,500 that I took during the August trip to the centre of London and back; Grand Union canal via London and back up Thames via Oxford.
I haven’t written a commentary yet but here’s the photos to get you started:
Cheers,
Callum.
September 18th, 2008
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