Positioning the trailer, hoisting some wire aerials & Cage construction
December 7th/8th 2002
December 14th further down the page
A few lads at work, Denis, Kevin and Paddy helped Tony and myself move the trailer to the back garden
By the time we had the snag in the top section sorted out & the trailer correctly positioned it was dark so the erecting of some wire aerials was put off until Sunday morning
Got the 80mtr dipole and the 40 mtr delta loop up today Sunday, it works very well on 80 & 40 mtrs, a quick call to K1BG on 3.798 yielded a 5/8 report with 100 watts. A lot of work re-routing cables/feeders. The 3rd image shows view from back of house, lots of work to be done on vhf arrays as you can see
Last image shows the deployed trailer, the rotator cage is started & should be complete by next weekend
Cage construction
December 14th 2002
The base/top of the cage were cut as Equilateral triangles so getting the centre was as easy as drawing lines at 30 degrees from each corner, the centre was roughly cut out next
Used a hardened drill bit, not sure what it is called exactly, but it did a fine job of cleaning out the hole on top of the cage so that a 50mm scaffold pipe can pass through to take the HF/VHF beams
The cage sides were cut all the same length, welded on to the base as square as possible, the Tx2 template was used when marking the holes for fixing the rotator, these holes were drilled & the tailtwister bolted down
A short length of 50mm pipe was passed through the cage top and passed down into the rotator before the cage frame was welded up to prevent the cage distorting while being welded
6mm mild steel bars were cut and welded to complete the triangulation in the cage, leaving one out so that the rotator can be removed & holes must be drilled above & below the pipe sections on both triangular parts before galvanizing,
The mounting bracket for my TA-33 senior HF triband beam was welded to the pole just above the cage (did I say HF ???) that will with luck take some of my vhf antenna system also