Sunday, June 5, 2022

Got My Big "Other" Project Done

A few weeks ago, I noted that I had been splitting my time between my long term, 1 by 1 engine project and “a big project that I have to wait on someone else to do their part before I can work on it.”  The part that someone else had to do was the tree removal we had done last Wednesday.  The big project was to make some repairs to my ham radio tower and antennas.  The "Potential Tropical Cyclone" rain washed out doing it Friday and Saturday, so today was the day.  

My tower is small by most peoples standards: 20 feet with a mast that extends five feet above that.  It's an aluminum tower, so fairly lightweight, and from the first ideas of buying that tower back around 1990 (I've really lost track of exactly when), my goal was to have it tilt over at its base so that with nothing but a small ladder and hand tools, I could remove antennas for a storm.  I did a major update to it back in February and March of '16, replacing the original steel pole that acted as the counterpoise that holds a pulley to direct the cable from a boat trailer winch to the attachment point on the tower, the winch and more.  With the exception of that winch, everything was now either stainless steel or aluminum.  Like millions of people, I've had aluminum boats before and spent time working on them.  The two I had always used aluminum rivets or stainless steel fasteners.  

Within a couple of years, it was obvious the galvanized steel winch was rusting.  I had told myself to replace it, spent time finding a stainless winch that wouldn't break the bank and would support the load.  While I was putting the 2016 upgrade together, I had done another couple of things I wanted to change, but the thing that made it urgent was something I inadvertently did early this year while upgrading my six meter antenna.  I didn't tighten down something holding the cable for my HF antenna, and while rotating the antenna to the south, ripped the connection to the antenna apart.  That meant I didn't have an antenna for some of the best HF bands: 20 to 10 meters. 

I forgot to take a picture of the winch before I took it off the aluminum pipe, but it looked like this afterward: 

The replacement winch is Chinesium and a winch that at least looks like it is sold widely.  Changing that was literally removing two nuts, swapping the winches and putting back the two nuts.  

The original winch was a boat trailer winch.  In practice, that means that it only cranks in one direction: winding in the cable (pulling the boat up the trailer in use).  If I disengage the ratchet to lower the tower, my arm is the only thing keeping it from rotating out of control and crashing everything into the ground.  To make matters worse, the plastic handle became frozen in place (probably more corrosion on the handle locked it in place) so that holding the handle was more difficult.  The new winch is a brake winch, meaning it has a brake mechanism so that if I stop cranking up or down the brake engages and the tower stops moving.  Safer is good! 

I spent a couple of hours in the morning, from pretty much 9 to 11, upgrading the winch and the way the cable attaches to the tower.  I waited from 11AM to almost 2PM before I went out to fix the antenna connections.  That's straightforward work but requires cleaning up the waterproofing compound I used, then dragging a soldering iron over to the feedpoint on the antenna.  What I had been concerned about being a job that would go into two days ended up taking one, with a lot of getting out of the sun.

This evening, everything checked out, the antenna worked like it was supposed to, the rotator worked properly, and I'm back to having a fully functional station again.  Hopefully the almost-tropical storm is the only one we'll have to face and I won't have to take this down again.  It can't apply to repairs, but my saying for antenna upgrades and projects is those always begin with "when it cools off."  There's still a few things to do, but they're cleanup-type things. 



10 comments:

  1. Sounds like 90% of what I wanted. An aluminum tower on a fold-over base with a winch. I was going to get a 35' tower, as that's the largest I could put up and be in compliance with the county building code.

    Glad that's done, and nice to hear somebody finished a project without any hidden surprises!

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    1. It went far better than I planned for. When I first put this one up, I had to loosen one of the stainless cable clamps and it had galled so badly I had to shear the nuts off the bolts.

      Expecting to have to do that again, I went to order four (because I need two and, well, you know) but found a dozen for the same price on Amazon, so now I have a bag of a dozen. I had put the replacements in place with a dab of Teflon grease on the threads and they came apart as easy as can be. So I spent $11 of cable clamps I didn't need. Which was the prudent thing to do.

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  2. Good work, and being beaten to death by a flailing crank handle is now off the table completely.

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    1. Not just being beaten to death, but having the skin on my hands abraded away or a blister the size of my palm. No thanks.

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    2. I'm making plans to put up a 30ft tower at my new place. Noise floor is very low out in the country and it's like having cotton pulled out of your ears to listen to the radio now... I can't wait to get a good antenna up and move a radio or two to the cabin.

      n

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    3. That's in my dreams. Since Brandon seems intent on destroying western civilization (and so my life's savings) it's not looking very likely.

      However, even here, with my modest station, I can see the noise level go up as I point my antenna over more houses. I'm on the eastern side of a development and I can hear the difference if I point my antennas west - down the block - rather than North or NW. A few years ago, there was one odd direction that was noticeably louder (by odd, I mean not over an area denser in houses than any other direction). I think it was one house or something. One day, it just went away. Did someone buy a new something? The utility company replaced something? I'll never know.

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    4. Compared to SoCal, the noise level here is almost non-existent! 40M was pretty useless in LA, with an S7~S9 noise level, and here it's like S2~S3.

      BUT.....we have certain types of noise here that I didn't see in LA. It's obviously man-made noise, but I haven't spent much time tracking it down. I suspect it's all the solar systems here, but until I send some screen shots of the noise to my solar-system noise guru, I won't know for sure.

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  3. Try doin that solderin job in a 40 mph wind at 1000’.
    John tower servive

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    1. Ironically, I was thinking exactly that while doing the job. (I didn't specify the wind)

      I've never done that sort of work, but I can imagine. Another reason why I want to crank my antennas over to ground level is that it's unusual to be able to reach the feedpoint to work on it when you're standing at the top of the tower. Even attaching a connector can require a cherry picker or a lift of some sort. With this arrangement, I sit on foot high stool and work on it right in front of me.

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  4. Tower service.

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