Revised:
04/30/2008

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'