F  E  E  D  -  P  O  I  N  T

The leaves are beginning to open on the trees in spite of cold, snow, and freezing temperatures. Wood Frogs started singing more than a week later than usual. Songbirds are coming in later than they usually do. Baby ravens are squawking in a nearby nest. Spring is here, I guess.

The testing session on May 19 was attended by four candidates. Mark Violette, KB1GKX, passed the Amateur Extra test. June Depres, KB1OWW, upgraded from Tech to General. Clarence Pittenger is a new ham at the Tech level. Joesph Paradis, N1ZKB, upgraded from Tech to General. Congratulations to all of them.

The Volunteer Examiners for the May 19th test session were KW1C, N7GLR, and N1FG. Newly accredited WB1FTK helped out. He had mixed 10 bags of cement for the base of his new antenna the day before. His back was not in very good shape.

Steve Kercel, AA4Ak, will be coming to our June 12th meeting from Brunswick, Maine. He will present to us information about the Merry Meeting Bay ARA Special Event Station N1P, that will operate August 17-19 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Popham Colony. Please, let's have a good attendance to welcome this speaker.

Spring, the time of year for planting. After getting the bug to operate on 160m, in the winter of ’05 we installed an Isotron antenna for the 2005 CQ 160 contest. At that time there was ~4’ of snow on the ground and this was our only option. It worked, but not very well. In ’06 we moved the antenna to a slightly better location away from the house and it’s metal roof. Performance improved slightly for the 2007 CQ 160 contest but still nothing to brag about. It had to be replaced for the upcoming 2008 contest.

We looked at various commercial antennas. All had problems … they were short, had loading coils, meant to be mounted low or had unsupported counterpoise arms (not good in ice storms). All were really shortcuts with questionable efficiencies (i.e.; physical and mounted heights of only 30/34’!). Height and size DO matter!

I contacted Dave, K1FK, to get an idea of what he thought might be a good solution. In 1999 he had constructed a 75’ 160/80m vertical at his place, see June ’04 QST. I also have the article scanned in jpeg format if anyone wants to read it. After much discussion and NEC modeling, he came up with a modified version for a 60’ vertical using 60 60’ radials. Going to 120 radials showed no real improvement for the additional cost. This fits perfectly in the space available. One eye opener during the modeling was that the ground conditions here are very, very poor (heavy shale deposits).

The antenna’s vertical element and four guy posts are constructed from four 30’ lengths of 5” diameter aluminum irrigation pipe. After cutting the steel couplers from the pipe ends, each resulting section only weighs 30 lbs. The insulated vertical element, consisting of two 30’ sections, will be guyed at 20’,40’ and 60’ with the 60’ level containing the top loading wires. After the snow finally melted, Diane and I did the layout using a surveyor’s transit (I have a collection of 25 transits and levels from 1960-1850) to ensure the guy posts where at 90º to each other and that the actual guy points were at the same elevation. Each guy point elevation was critical to maintain a constant top loading wire angle, in our case 39º which resulted in a take-off angle of ~32º. The guy post’s heights’ are at 7’, 14 ½’, 9 ½’ and 8 ½’. No flat land here!

As of May 20th, the guy posts and the element pier are concreted in, a total of twenty 80lb bags were hand mixed (I now use a hand walker). Laying down the 3,600’ of 14ga copper ground wire is next.

As I mentioned at the beginning, “Spring, the time of year for planting”, we’re planting aluminum, concrete and copper wire.

More as the project progresses ……. ’73 Don WB1FTK