New skywire
May. 8th, 2009 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoMy antenna has been defective for months now. The feed line had broken loose from the radiating elements, making the whole thing useless. Last fall I ordered a commercial replacement, a somewhat better-constructed version of the same design, but when it came the bad weather had already set in. Lowering a 100 foot long antenna and raising a replacement in ice and snow... Well, it could be done of course, but I didn't need it that badly.
One of the things on my to-do list for this week was to finally get the old antenna down and the replacement up. Did that today. It turned out to be easier than I'd expected. In spite of the fact that the nylon ropes holding up the old one had been in place up in the trees for ten years, they still were strong and had not bound up in the bark so they slipped right down. We figured out how we had threaded the 102 feet of copper wire through the tree branches last time, and by using the old lines to pull the new ones into place, and then the new lines to raise the copper, we got it up there. The old one worked so well that I'm quite confident this will be great.
(For the radio geeks, it's a G5RV style doublet, full sized, with 450 ohm ladder line feed from an air-core coaxial balun. 102 feet on top, height above ground about 36 feet, orientation roughly NW-SE. I use a pi matching circuit for low power operation on HF, 80-10 meters. The orientation seems to help me work into Europe and the South Pacific easily, but Africa and Asia are not quite so good. And it won't sing on top band. I need to do something else for that.)
Now to replace the 2 meter vertical. I really need something for both 2 m. and 70 cm. And I've never had a 6 m. antenna at all...
Enough. There's a thunderstorm here, need to close stuff down.
One of the things on my to-do list for this week was to finally get the old antenna down and the replacement up. Did that today. It turned out to be easier than I'd expected. In spite of the fact that the nylon ropes holding up the old one had been in place up in the trees for ten years, they still were strong and had not bound up in the bark so they slipped right down. We figured out how we had threaded the 102 feet of copper wire through the tree branches last time, and by using the old lines to pull the new ones into place, and then the new lines to raise the copper, we got it up there. The old one worked so well that I'm quite confident this will be great.
(For the radio geeks, it's a G5RV style doublet, full sized, with 450 ohm ladder line feed from an air-core coaxial balun. 102 feet on top, height above ground about 36 feet, orientation roughly NW-SE. I use a pi matching circuit for low power operation on HF, 80-10 meters. The orientation seems to help me work into Europe and the South Pacific easily, but Africa and Asia are not quite so good. And it won't sing on top band. I need to do something else for that.)
Now to replace the 2 meter vertical. I really need something for both 2 m. and 70 cm. And I've never had a 6 m. antenna at all...
Enough. There's a thunderstorm here, need to close stuff down.
