[today’s run: 7 miles (probably 2 miles of walking included)]<\/p>\n
We’ve had this thing on the to-do list for awhile.<\/p>\n
The local ham club has a tower and they want to put a rotator and directional antenna up there.<\/p>\n
I’ve made a couple of trips up to the top of that tower and we have yet to be successful in installing the equipment.\u00a0 Today we try again.\u00a0 I’m taking up the rotator plate and some aluminum angle and various stainless steel bolts and nuts.\u00a0 And I’m taking my portable drill and some drill bits.\u00a0 And a clamp.<\/p>\n
The plan is to use a short mast pipe to suspend the rotator from the peak of the tower through the guide pipe already in place.\u00a0 Then I will position and drill holes to put in three aluminum angle pieces to attach the rotator plate to the tower legs.\u00a0 That’s the plan.<\/p>\n
— later —<\/p>\n
I was up on the tower a for at least three hours.\u00a0 I got most of the work done on the rotator but I’ll have to go back up and make some adjustments before we can actually use it.\u00a0 But that’s OK because there’s no antenna up there yet anyway.<\/p>\n
Generally the plan worked as expected.\u00a0 After getting myself up there and getting my climbing gear all tied into the tower, I could use both hands to then haul up a bucket of tools and the various parts I needed.\u00a0 The drilling and mounting went OK.\u00a0 I dropped one little 7\/16th’s socket, but it didn’t hit anybody.\u00a0 I was smart enough to put a string on my drill, so I had it all tied in even when I was using it.\u00a0 I didn’t want to drop that from 100 ft!<\/p>\n
I got the cross braces in (u-bolts around the tower legs), and the rotor plate.\u00a0 And I got the rotor mounted to the rotor plate at the same time the mast was up through the guide pipe.\u00a0 I’m hoping that means it is all lined up right.\u00a0 I had to drill holes for the u-bolts and for the bolts holding down the rotor plate<\/p>\n
Then on the way down I stopped every 3-4 feet and used cable ties on the rotor control cable to tie it to the tower leg.<\/p>\n
The weather was nice.\u00a0 It was a bit breezy but I didn’t have any real trouble with that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[today’s run: 7 miles (probably 2 miles of walking included)] We’ve had this thing on the to-do list for awhile. The local ham club has a tower and they want to put a rotator and directional antenna up there. I’ve made a couple of trips up to the top of that tower and we have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ham-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5358"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5361,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5358\/revisions\/5361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}