Oct 16 KT4ZB Antenna Work

Here is a nice summary from Jere-KT4ZB about the antenna work day at his QTH last weekend.  Great time was had by all.

Hi all - It was fantastic Saturday afternoon at the KT4ZB station. Lots of folks showed up to put up antennas and such. Kevin - K4WB, Paul - KJ4FAV, Dr. Ken - W4KJG, Peter - KJ4FAW, John Lewis, Mark - KD4PDX, Lester - KF4JBQ, and Guy - K4GTM all came and donated their time.Paul climbed the tower and untangled some drop lines, leveled the bottom yagi and redid the strain reliefs for the two beams. See the pictures on facebook that Guy took (thanks Guy, they're great). Although Steve - K4SDJ and Bill - K4WP didn't make it, the coax that Bill prepared did and Steve sent along some much needed drop line and PL connectors. Lester installed a serial port pci card in my computer and Mark laid out coax and drop line.

Ken constructed a new 160m dipole after considering my design (which sucked?) and Kevin brought along his "potato" bazooka to shoot lines over 90 foot trees. Conni was amazed (as I, you had to be there!). Later Saturday night, Conni and I were watching the current episode of "Bones" which featured a victim killed by an Bean Bag shotgun and we both yelled, "It's Kevin's air gun!".

One of the highlights of the day, and early evening, was putting up the 40m Bobtail Curtain. It is a huge antenna consisting of two 67 ft horizontal phasing wires and three 1/4 wave vertical elements. Peter and I worked on all the tie lines and tried to get the right antennas on the correct side of the tower. The 40m antenna is on one side and the 80m wire is on the other; both going to a pully arrangement tied to neighbor's tree (what good neighbors we have). While the curtain still requires a center support line, it plays well. Saturday night I made contacts with five German stations.

The 160m dipole went up, came down for adjustments, went back up and then came back down for one more change. No easy feat when you consider it is 270 feet long and goes over the house. Ken had a huge smile when the analyzer showed a SWR of 1.14 at 1.856 MHz.

Today the flux was at 86 and 10m was open this morning into Africa; worked South Africa and Mozambique. I notice Mac reported openings into Africa on Saturday too.

Again thanks to all who came, I hope I didn't leave anyone out. Having that many hands really makes things go well. Remember, whenever I report great contacts or good scores, much of that is only obtained because of the help of good friends.

CU on the bands - Jere