Wires
What's a ham station without wires. These are in addition to those
attached to and described on other tower pages. Between tower 1 and
tower 4 there is a catenary rope that supports a 3 element 80 Meter
array. The reflector runs through trees on the SW side and 56 feet
from the tower. The
driven element is at about 112' at the tower and the director, about 46 feet
toward tower 4, is at about
70'. The elements are adjusted for either 3550 or 3800, depending on
the contest. The azimuth heading is about 50 degrees and covers
Europe, the Middle East and most of Africa.
Out in a wooded area is an 80 meter Top loaded cage Ground Plane
Vertical. The cage is made up of 6 #12 THHN conductors with Lexan
spacers. It's about 50 feet tall with a top loading wire. It is
fed across a shunt coil at the base and has 36 radials of 135 feet.
There are five Beverage antennas. These are situated in the woods
outside the perimeter of the main towers. Four of them are fed through
home wound qudrafiler transformers. These transformers are on 1"
Toroid forms, wound with four conductor telephone line (outer jacket striped
away). One conductor is wired as a primary and the other three are
connected in series to form the secondary. The Beverage wires are
about 7' above ground with a short ground stake at each end, terminated with 680 ohm
resistors. The E/W Beverage is fed through the same type transformers
from each end. When switched to the East, the west end feedline is
shorted to ground at the E/W selector switch in the shack. The reverse
is done when it is pointed West. Feedlines for these antennas varies
between 75 Ohm CATV cable (1/2 and 7/8") and 75 Ohm RG-11AP Pentabond
by Omega. Antennas are oriented as follows. NNW
700', NE 650', E/W 400', SSE 400' and WSW 540'
 
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