Beginning late in July, I gradually disassembled the shack until there was nothing left. First I removed the second operating position, then the SO2R gear the remaining amplifier and other peripheral equipment. Soon the desk was empty and even that was disassembled. You can see that nothing was left.
This is temporary. If all goes well I'll be active again within days. I wasn't happy with the shack desk that I built last year so I am rebuilding it. The new one should be ready to install shortly. It is designed for a more ergonomic SO2R operating position while allowing rapid reconfiguration for a two-position multi-op. I'll say more about it when it's fully built. That could be a while since I'll be reconstructing the shack in stages.
There are no new towers planned this year. There may never be. Acquiring towers at a good price is no problem, and I certainly have the space to put them. I remain very fit and I do a lot of tower work for myself and others, but time is unkind to all of us and one day that will no longer be the case. I don't want to create a maintenance nightmare in my sunset years, or at least nothing worse than what I now face.
My 2023 plan was written 9 months ago and an update is necessary. I will not get it all done, and indeed that happens every year. I like to aim high and make compromises along the way as I determine my true priorities versus what might only be nice to have.
For those keeping track (which, I'm sure, is no one except me), you can compare the current outlook with my plan for 2023. I'll do well if I get all these jobs done (coloured in red).
The trap tri-banders -- TH6 and TH7 -- are going away. I decide a while ago to migrate away from trap yagis due the inevitable loss in the traps. They have been helpful until now by filling an immediate need. Now I am in a position to move on, mostly.
The Hy-Gain Explorer 14 sat idle for a long time until I sold it last year. The TH7 was recently sold to a friend. It did its job when I had fewer antennas but it, too, is now surplus. The TH6 will come down and be set aside while I contemplate whether to sell it or put it elsewhere. It might be useful fixed south for rapid multiplier hunting. The resale value of this 50 year old antenna is pitifully low so I'm tempted to find a use for it.
Per my plan, I purchased a trap-less tri-band yagi for a multiplier antenna. It is a Bencher Skyhawk tri-band yagi (now manufactured and sold by DX Engineering). I jumped at the opportunity since it is faster and easier than designing and building an equivalent antenna. The antenna is well regarded and the performance is quite good.
The way I bought the Skyhawk is funny. Earlier this summer I was helping to dismantle an old friend's station. He hasn't been active for a while and decided to exit the hobby. The Skyhawk was on the smaller of his towers. I had a good look while rigging it for lowering and I liked what I saw. Once we had it on the ground I asked him, from 50' up the tower, how much he was asking for it. We proceed to negotiate by shouting back and forth and settled on a price. There was much laughter from the others helping that day.
After a few days of work the towers and antennas were down and the towers trucked to their new owners. One more trip with the help of a friend and his truck brought the Skyhawk home along with hundreds of pounds of aluminum and steel he'd accumulated over the years. Some of it I recognized from my youth decades earlier when I worked on his towers.
In the picture you can see the Skyhawk boom reassembled and many of the elements. At right is a small portion of the gifted aluminum. One picture can't do justice to how much aluminum there really is. Some of it has already gone to another ham with his own fall antenna plans. That will still leave me plenty of pipes and tubes to build several antennas that I have planned. But perhaps not this year.
When the Skyhawk replaces the XM240 on the Trylon tower I'll have a fully rotatable tri-bander up 21 meters that performs well and can be turned more quickly than the upper yagis of the 20, 15 and 10 meter stacks that are rotated with slower prop pitch motors. Speed counts in a contest. The Skyhawk replace the TH6, which is side mounted with limited rotation.
Putting the XM240 where the TH6 presently resides will reduce my capability on 40 meters since it will only be rotatable between southeast (South America) and west (W7/VE7/Pacific). This is temporary. My plan is for a 2-element reversible Moxon that will be more efficient, have improved F/B and SWR, instant switching between Europe and the US, and 270° of compass coverage. If I get ambitious I'll stack it with the big 3-element yagi at the top of the tower (150').
I considered a W6NL Moxon conversion of the XM240, but that's no longer necessary with all the aluminum in my possession. In any case that would have been only a partial job since I want to make it reversible. A reversible yagi makes the best use of the side mount, and I really want to avoid the mechanical challenge of a swing gate and rotator that can handle the torque from an antenna of that size offset on a swing gate. The ancient Ham-M on the side mount should have no difficulty with the 40 meter Moxon, despite its long elements, since the wind area will be lower than the TH6.
I have preliminary computer models for the reversible Moxon but I doubt I'll be able to build and test it this year. Hopefully I'll be able to replace the XM240 with the new antenna in 2024. I could do a conversion of the XM240 but it is actually easier to build a reversible Moxon from scratch with the aluminum I recently acquired and sell the XM240 if I choose to do that.
That will have to suffice for 40 meter antenna work this year since I must consider the work to repair the capacitance hats of the 3-element 40 meter yagi. That's a major repair job that I have planned this fall. The new design that I installed earlier this year is performing well so I've gone ahead and made replacements for the director and reflector elements.
I recently designed a 2-element yagi for 17 and 12 meters. There are published designs out there but I preferred try to do it myself. This antenna is in my 2023 plan. The priority isn't high and I will delay the project if necessary. There is also the challenge of where to put it since I am running out of tower space!
My plan for 160 meters is modest compared to my stated ambitions. I will improve performance of the shunt-fed tower, and that may be it. The radials will be doubled from 8 to 16. I have been accumulating scrap wire over the past year to make up the 240 meters of wire for the additional 8 radials. Small gauge wire isn't so expensive that I need to scrounge but it's more fun this way. Once a scrounger always a scrounger.
The other problem I want to address is the small SWR bandwidth of the antenna. As ON4UN documented in detail in his book Low Band DXing, electrically long verticals have a narrow matching range. For daily operating it is not a problem since activity is concentrated between 1810 and 1843 kHz. The narrow bandwidth becomes a problem during contests when activity spreads from 1800 to beyond 1900 kHz.
The solution is a wider gamma rod. A wire cage is lightweight and cheap and is as effective as a large diameter "wire". I have been considering alternatives mechanical designs, one of which you can see above on my indoor tower jig. Before settling on a design I'll model several configurations. Work on the 160 meter vertical will have to wait until at least late September.
At the right of the picture you can see a lot of LDF4 Heliax. This is ancient cable that I first used in 1985. It has seen some rough handling over the years and is now little better than scrap. The impedance "bumps" on the three 40 meter lengths begin to emerge as low as 4 to 5 MHz. So what can be done with it other than disposing of it as trash? Answer: Beverage!
I don't really need another Beverage for more directions. The 6 directions I now have serve me well. What I'm missing is a directional antenna for the second station for use in multi-op contests. The Beverage switching system is not designed to be sharable and schemes for doing it all have shortcomings. A separate receive antenna can help when both stations are on the low bands at night. Most of the time these will be 80 and 160 meters, but sometimes 40 meters when a little extra noise reduction is needed to dig out a weak station.
My intent is to run it east-west and make it reversible like my other coax Beverage made from RG6. It will run along the fence line that I used for a temporary 90 meter long west Beverage a few years ago. If its 120 meter length makes it too directive I can shorten it. This is a project for late fall when the snow flies and tower projects are wrapped up for the season.
I have several work items to pursue this fall on 80 meters. The easiest is to improve the anchors for the 80 meter inverted vee that I re-installed this year. Most of what I'll need has been prepared for some time but I delayed the work due to the growing hay and the arrival of tick season.
The central tower of the 80 meter vertical yagi has to be replaced before I can make antenna improvements. That involves planting improved guy anchors. These will be identical to what I made for the overhead cable run. It is a physical job that is best delayed until the weather cools, but must be completed before the ground freezes. The new anchors can be built without disturbing the tower and antenna. However, I'll have to move quickly should I decide to replace the tower this fall because the antenna is needed for the coming major contests.
There are several half-completed projects on the back workbench that you can't make out in the above picture. I'll talk about those another time. This is, as usual, a busy time of year.
Inside the shack, the new operating desk is slowly coming together. The desktop's final coat of polyurethane is drying and the multitude of cables is being organized. This project, too, will progress in stages. I want to get the station minimally operational soon even though I have little motivation to operate in August. I don't want to rush later since that will result in a sloppy job. I'm a poor carpenter but I wasn't satisfied with the suitability of the numerous commercial products I looked at.
Other indoor projects include: rotator controllers, improved performance and new features for the station automation system, lightning protection and computer networking. Outdoors maintenance items include clearing of summer growth around the Beverage antennas, removing tree limbs near overhead cables, checking and replacing cable ties, and much more. Maintenance is the curse of a big station.
There's no end to all the work and that's fine. Amateur radio is a great hobby to learn new things and see immediate results when you put your station to the test. Sharing what I learn in this blog is one way I give back the hobby.
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