Categories
Ham Radio

Tower Work

[Monday: 3.4 miles; Wednesday: 3.4 miles]

We have been having some trouble with our internet recently, which is my excuse this time for not getting a blog post done earlier.

Last Friday I met a couple of guys from the ham radio club and we went up to the tower site north of Aberdeen, MS, about 45 minutes from here.   The weather was cloudy, and the forecast said that rain and breezy conditions would be moving in later in the day.

We connected with the home owners and got ourselves organized, looking around at the setup and what would be needed.  Eventually I climbed up the tower.  There were three antennas still installed on a mast at the top.   I got all three down and got the rotator and some of the multi-section mast.  We also cleared off  some wire antennas and all of the feed lines.  After a break I went back up and we removed the top guy lines.

I was working on setting up the gin-pole to remove the top tower section and it started to get more breezy.  I started having “this is stupid” thoughts, so I retreated down the tower and called it a day.  We divided up the equipment with one fellow taking the multi-element 2 meter beam, another taking the 3-element HF beam, and me taking the tower parts and the rotor.

Saturday was a nicer day. We got started around 10.  I had some trouble with the borrowed gin-pole so we reverted to using my cobbled-together pole.  The top section still had a 10ft piece of 2 inch steel pipe mast attached which probably gave that top section twice the weight of bare tower.  We got it down OK.  I had some trouble on the 2nd section because the tower piece was impinging on my gin pole pulley.  I had not used my gin pole in years, so it took me a while to figure it out.

After those two it was guy line removal again, then two more sections, guy lines, two more sections.  And by that time it was starting to get on toward dark.  So we left it with 40′ of tower still in the air,  60 ft on the ground.  I hope we can get back out there Saturday if the weather will allow it.

While I was doing the gin-pole thing, John was on the ground and found a small rattlesnake in the woods near the guy anchors (I think).  So he probably had more danger than I did.

Link to some pictures at hamseatingchicken.com