A confluence of motives convinced me to load the car with my climbing gear and drive to Winnipeg in late August. I've had several polite requests to do tower work for friends back home (Winnipeg is my home town). As elsewhere, there are fewer hams willing and able to do tower work and commercial alternatives haven't worked for them for a variety of reasons. The car was also packed with items from a deceased relative to be handed off to family. This is not the first time I travelled to do tower work.
Although it's a long drive (over 2200 km), with so much to carry it was not practical to fly. A large part of the drive north of Lake Superior is rugged and very beautiful, and I wanted to do it one last time. I don't expect to take the land route again; future visits will have to be by air.
As any contester will know, there is not a lot of contest activity from VE4. There was more when I was a young man, or at least that's how it seemed to me. Aging of the ham population and slower adoption of contesting by the younger generations of hams is as true there as elsewhere. This is despite the growing population of the province and of Winnipeg in particular (approaching 800,000), and growth of the overall ham population. There are many hams but most activity is on VHF, UHF and higher, focussed on technology and data networking. HF activity has declined. Again, that is no different than elsewhere.
In this article I'll talk about towers and antennas, and about some of the hams I met with. I apologize for the lack of pictures of hams in this article. I was focussed on towers and antennas, taking pictures on the tower but not off. While I will use what I found as topics worth discussion, as a matter of privacy I will not say which station belongs to whom. Not all belong to contesters.
First, the people. I was invited to the RSM (Radiosport Manitoba) annual BBQ. There were 12 attendees, not all contesters but certainly enthusiastic and active operators.The host was Gary VE4YH. Although his call may be unfamiliar to contesters, he hosts remote operators for contests. The station is larger than most though still modest. On his tallest tower he has a JK 3-element coil loaded 40 meter yagi that works very well from what I was told.
While the burgers and dogs sizzled on the grill I gave a talk on the building of my station. It's one I've presented a few times, updated to keep in step with the continuous changes that I make.
Perhaps the best known contester who drove in for the BBQ was Todd VE5MX. Surprisingly it was our first "eyeball" QSO. We had an interesting chat. He is headed to the WRTC competition in England next year (2026). His own station (re)building pace has slowed while his crew -- daughter and son-in-law -- start their family. Todd is a proud grandfather despite the wait for his crew to return.
My oldest ham radio buddy and fellow contester is Rob VE4GV. You'll hear him most often from PJ2T, portable /6Y, and occasionally from his own suburban station. He has quite a story to tell, which is related in great detail on his QRZ.com page. My original call (VE4OY, since reissued) shows up a few times.
Jessy VE4JBB/VE4DX is relatively young compared to most contesters. He has a tower and wires at his father-in-law's farm outside of Winnipeg. We can expect to hear more from him in the future. For now he is busy raising a family and his job in the IT sector. He gave me a few ideas for accelerating software development for my station projects by using AI tools. I'll have to explore that, but I admit to having doubts.
Barry VE4MA has long been a pioneer in EME and the microwave bands, with his exploits and record attempts published widely. I got my first and only experience of EME by listening to echoes of him pinging 432 MHz signals off the moon. That was in the late 1970s while I was in university. He continues to be very active locally and at his winter home in Arizona.
Cary VE4EA organized my tower work schedule while I was in town. My trip came about when I reached out to him to find a local tower climber who could help an elderly ham in Winnipeg. One thing led to another and off I went. Cary operates contests remotely since he lost his tower in a storm several years ago. During winter he occasionally joins multi-op teams at various stations in the US southwest.
Cary also arranged a visit and tour of Winnipeg Seniors Amateur Radio Club: VE4WSC. It is in an old fire station that was gifted to RAM (Radio Amateurs of Manitoba) for their use. There is a lot of space for meetings, stations (VHF, UHF and HF), workshops and a variety of radio and networking equipment. It's on a prime strip of real estate on a major thoroughfare and bordering the Red River. I imagine that any club would drool over this extraordinary facility. A picture of the fire station and its complement of antennas can be found using the above link.
The main purpose of my visit was to discuss HF antennas, specifically what might be possible. Since it's a city owned building any towers or other building attachments must meet their standards. The fire hall brick tower is in poor condition (the building is old!). The roof and masonry had to be reinforced just to support the Hy-Gain Explorer 14 yagi and other antennas. There are wires for the lower HF bands.
They will likely need to install a tower higher than the building (70'+) adjacent to the building to improve their HF capability. They can't make that decision on their own since the installation will have to be done by professionals approved by the city. Perhaps the bigger problem is lack of interest in HF by most of the local hams. They have a modern and sophisticated station that sits idle most of the time. It's available should an emergency arise but it could be used for so much more.
Now let's talk about towers.
After my recent tirade against the excess enthusiasm hams have for nylocs I will now address another obsession: stainless steel. It is a myth that stainless hardware is always superior to more prosaic steel fasteners.
There are 3 critical questions to ask before selecting stainless fasteners:
- Alloy
- Strength and toughness
- Galvanic corrosion when in contact with other popular metals, especially aluminum
At right is a thrust bearing where the steel set bolts were replaced with stainless. F593C was stamped on the bolt heads, which is not very specific with respect to alloy and grade. They were seized within the thick cast aluminum bearing housing. They were too tight to the mast to jack up the mast and antennas (400 lb) to access the rotator.
After liberal dosing with penetrating oil, two of the bolts heads still sheered off when forced with a long wrench. The third reluctantly turned. That was enough to jack the mast. There was an ample coating of "white dust" on the embedded bolt threads due to galvanic corrosion. It is almost always the case with most stainless alloys in contact with aluminum. Choose suitable alloys and lubricate stainless hardware. Otherwise prepare for future trouble.
I replaced the bolt with a fully threaded grade 5 bolt. Also, those locking nuts really ought to be outside the housing, not inside. Those, at least, all turned with the help of penetrating oil.
While we're on the subject of thrust bearings, let me counter another popular myth that I've mentioned more than once on this blog: do not support the mast and antennas dead load with the thrust bearing. These devices are almost universally designed for radial loads only.
Too many have their lifetimes cut short due to this persistent myth. I've seen this happen more times than I can count. Don't let yours end up like the one at right. They are not easy to remove and replace!
There are industrial bearings rated for both axial and radial load, but those are not the ones typically marketed to hams as tower thrust bearings. I have several of those bearings to support massive antenna systems to protect the prop pitch motors (rotators) from radial and axial loads.
Place the load on the rotator where it belongs. Rotators have all those bearings and large diameter races to withstand hundreds of pounds of axial load and even a substantial bending moment. A polymer sleeve/bushing is usually more than sufficient to hold a mast in place -- a bearing isn't necessary and a bushing is easy to repair or replace. But I am under no illusion that this article will extinguish thrust bearing myths. I expect that the myth will outlive me.
For some reason I've found myself repairing a number of old Moseley yagis this year. The driven elements are difficult to work on since the screws that secure the coax pigtails also provide mechanical support for the element halves. This one uses a cable tie and wire as secondary supports to ease electrical work. It's ugly but it works. I had to redo the setup to replace a cracked insulator and severely weathered coax and rotation loop.
My very first yagi was a TA33jr (same as the one above) back in 1975. I'm not nostalgic and I still don't like them for their poor mechanical design and lossy traps. But they sure have a lot of satisfied customers. Unlike so many other antenna companies, Moseley is still in business and selling many of the same antennas they did decades ago.
Trylon self-supporting towers are very popular in Canada. They can handle smaller yagis and quite large HF stacks depending on the tower model and height. As you might expect, many hams put far too much on top. When the tower fails they blame the tower rather than themselves. Optimism is nice as long as it doesn't blind you to the realities of mechanical engineering.
The most popular Trylon self-supporting tower among hams is the Titan series -- I have one. For more demanding applications the more expensive Super Titan series is occasionally selected. Price, weight and foundation requirements must be considered before selecting any tower. A realistic assessment of wind load for your area is vital. Destructive prairie winds can rip across the landscape when you least expect it. The winds laugh at hams and their towers.
I saw a couple of Trylon Super Titan towers during my stay in Winnipeg and worked on one of them. Since the diagonals have a large slope, optional pegs are attached to one leg for climbing. Although this is an awkward way to climb a tower it is far better than dealing with the steep diagonal struts. Steel soled boots are mandatory.
Self-supporting tapered towers are stressed in predictable ways. The most common experience is bending stress due to the wind load (lateral force) of yagis at the top. When the legs yield it typically occurs about ⅓ of the tower's height from the top. Depending on the installation details, the failure point can be a little lower than that, but probably not below ½ the height.
A Trylon tower that has been stressed in this fashion may exhibit bent struts (structural members between the legs on a tower face) where a future failure is likely to occur. That's a danger sign that I've seen on far too many ham towers. The struts (or diagonals, if you prefer) can be replaced if you can find a source. If lightly bent it may be possible to bend them back into shape; any more and the tempered steel will be weakened. These measures can buy you time but that's all. I advise tower owners to reconsider the entire installation.
There are other failure modes. One is torque due to wind action on the yagis; most yagis are not symmetrical with respect to wind surface area and can build up a lot of momentum due to oscillations and wind gusts. In this case the tower usually fails at or slightly below the rotator. The struts at that location often do not show bending stress before the legs fail.
A less common failure mode (in my experience) is due to bending stress on the top section(s) when the mast is stronger than the tower. The struts above the rotator will likely be bent.
I've found many installations where the owner insists on the strongest chrome-molybdenum mast available and places it in a tower of far lower strength. That is guesswork, not engineering! A strong mast won't save your tower. I am speaking from experience.
The adjacent picture shows upper section bending stress on a Trylon Titan tower I inspected during my trip. The same damage was found on all three tower faces.
The tower is old and there are two large yagis on top. I'm surprised that it hadn't already failed. As you can see this is in a tightly packed suburban area where failure poses significant risks. I suspect the tower lasted this long due to wind shadowing by the many mature trees in this old neighbourhood. Trees don't grow fast in cold prairie soil.
I gave the tower owner a few ideas on how to deal with the problem but there was nothing more I could do. Any solution will be difficult and expensive. Ideally the tower be taken down and replaced with one engineered to survive.
I'll end with a story of tower rust. Towers don't rust quickly on the cold and dry Canadian prairie. A similar badly rusted tower of the same age where I live could still be rust free in Winnipeg.
If the rust doesn't go deep it is easy to repair. Remove the loose stuff and use one of the available paints to coat the damaged area. It can be a messy job on a tower, especially using spray paint.
I was fortunate that the wind was light and in the right direction to allow application of a cold galvanizing spray on this minor rust damage without getting any on my clothes. For my own towers I wait for favourable weather, a luxury I did not have on this busy trip.
I hope to be back to a regular schedule soon. Too much has been going on this summer. I have a lot of tower and antenna work to get done before winter and the major contests.
