6/17/05
8AM Friday morning, June 17, 2005, John, KF8KK arrived at the repeater site. Anyone who knows Johnny, knows that 8AM is an hour of the day that he normally does not experience with his eyes open. However, today was a special day! The plans for today's activities had been in the works for well over a year. Today the new antenna system was to move up the tower to the 350 foot level of the 400 foot tall tower. The existing antenna system is at the 100 foot level. Glen, a 73 year old professional climber, had been hired to replace the light bulbs on the tower and then install the antenna system. KF8KK and WA8ZWJ and started to work right away by rolling out the 430' of 7/8" hard line for the UHF antenna. Mike, N7LMJ soon arrived and he and ZWJ rolled out the 500' of 1/2" hard line for the six meter antenna. The hard line lengths were plenty long in case it was decided to take the new antenna system all the way to the top of the 400' tower. The ground crew was completed by Del, WB8DEL who services the pair of radio stations at the site and who is responsible for the tower system.
As you can see in the photos, the UHF antenna is a 4 bay dipole set up and the six meter antenna is a single dipole sharing the same mast which is to be side mounted to the tower.
Glen's pickup truck is specially set up to handle most of the work lifting the antennas and hard line. His winch systems is a 24 volt golf cart motor attached to a spool of rope that is over 3,000 feet long! Yes, he does work on towers as tall as 1,500' and needs that much rope! The winch system had no difficulty in raising the antenna system or both hard lines at the same time.
In Johnny's own words from Saturday evening...."I spent the afternoon on site doing the final prep work of the cables and such. It's all connectorized, polyphaser'd.... grounds are in, yadda yadda, yadda. No desense detected, and no FM broadcast interference either. It just seems to work. I did NOT remove the extra duplexer cans in the 440 yet (the 440 duplexer consists of a six cavity duplexer in combination with a four cavity--- the extra cavities helped with that intermittent noise problem years back). I'm sure when I remove the second set of cans that there will be yet another small gain in rx and tx.... But, I want to make one improvement at a time and see how it works....
I think the work was NOT in vain--- I'm told by KG8CU that signals went from an S3/S7 (52.92/444.725) to a full scale on both.... Mike reports that while some spots downtown near the airport have S7 on 440, more of them have a full pin.... Mike's Mitrek stopped working so he has no 6m reference. Even K8BTE gave it a try this afternoon--- sadly, he came on while passing the fish hatchery on 31 and said the signal was lousy.. like s2 or so.... He thought we weren't on the big antenna... but, things improved dramatically as he got into downtown Honor and then even more so when he got near his home... Full scale inside his garage. So, the fish hatchery is still a lousy spot for 440... but, S2 is better than it was I think...
Congratulations John! Keep up the great work! Thanks for your efforts towards ham radio communication in the Greater Traverse City Area!
May the force of the IOOK be with you always!
