I learned an important lesson today – a crane with a bucket IS NOT the way to put an antenna up! It was great for the tower, but not the beam because you have absolutely no control over rotation! I got a feel for how it must be for astronauts! After two tries, we finally got me and the beam up to the tower with only a little bending of elements against the crane’s boom. I spend a good half-hour struggling to mate the mounting plates, but it finally worked.

11/11

11/12

From the Astronomical Applications Dept. of the U. S. Naval Observatory I got a chart on the web for sunrise/sunset times for my town. It shows sunrise/sunset for today at 0657/1721 hours local time. Shadows will point true north exactly between those times or 1209 - just nine minutes after noon. I went out at that time and found the tower’s shadow pointing almost exactly at a distant tree. I’ll use that for my aiming point for the beam as I point it True North.

After work I went up the tower for the first time to aim the beam, level the elements out, and dress the coax around the rotor. Just for grins I dragged an extension cord out to the tower base and hooked up the rotor controller – it was pretty cool to see such a big beam turn with the twist of a dial!

11/17

I plan to hang a bunch of wires off the tower for 40, 80, and maybe 160, so instead of running a bunch of separate coax lines from the house I decided on an Ameritron RCS-8V 5-position coax switch. Surprisingly, the manual says wire gauge for the control cable doesn’t matter; simple phone cable with at least five conductors will work. I have a big spool of some small-gauge six-conductor cable I cut to length and tried out on the bench – worked like a charm. I also added jumpers as described in the manual to ground the unselected antennas and all of them when the power is off.