This is the "WA7SVC" tower and beam. I inheritied this from Bill, WA7SVC when
he moved out of his house and needed to get rid of it. I still consider it his antenna,
I'm just borrowing it. Click on the image to see the photo gallery of the raizing and raising project.
The tower is a Rohn 25G and originally had only one 10 foot base section and the top, so the antenna was only 26 feet in the air. I added another 10 foot section so it's now at 35 feet. It's set on a hinged base section going 3 feet into the ground anchored by 1,200 pounds of concrete.
The antenna is a HyGain TH3-Mk3 tribander with about 8 dB of gain. I rebuilt it completely with a "plastics" and "stainless steel" parts kit that HyGain (now owned by MFJ) still sells. So, it's a brand new antenna again.
The rotator is a Cornell Dubler Ham II unit, now marketed by Yeasu. I bought a Rotor-EZ kit from Idom Press and now the rotator is virtually a hands-off operation - I just set the direction point with the calibration knob, tap the brake switch, and off she goes. It even has a serial interface to operate it from my computer. A far cry from the original design that dates back to the 1960s!
Needless to say, this was a huge project, for me at least. I completed it on Labor Day, 2003 and it's my pride and joy now. Some my neighbors don't particularly like it, but unfortunately for them, it's been approved by the city and that 1,200 lbs of concrete just ain't gonna sprout legs and walk away.
That's my pwecious puppy Yuki at the bottom. She was very helpful in overseeing the project and making sure that all dropped doggie biscuits were cleaned up promptly.
This was a 17 meter 2-element Moxon beam that I built with parts from Home Depot.
Everything on this antenna, with the exception of the balun and coax, was made from
readily available hardware and cost around $40 to build.
It has (in theory) about 6 dBi gain and utilized a reliable Armstrong rotator system. It's an ugly ducking, and weighed a ton because the structure is made from 2x4's, but it worked great!
Well, this eyesore is now in storage and the TV antenna mast it was mounted on currently supports a Comet GP-6 for 144/440 MHz and one corner of a wire loop.
The mast also supports a pulley that holds hoists the center of my 75 meter inverted vee. In the photo the mast was lowered because I took the shot right after we'd raised the tower and the mast was down to keep it out of the way. Now the top is up about 30 feet, just below the beam level, as you can see in this more recent photo.
The last time we had our trees trimmed, the tree-guy installed pulleys in the tops of each one, so I have ropes that I can haul wire up whenever I come up with another crazy antenna idea. They're currently holding up a somewhat lopsided loop fed with 450 ohm ladderline. I didn't bother to try to cut it to any particular frequency, I just made it as long as I could and use an MFJ-986 antenna tuner to match it. The average height is about 30 feet above ground. It works very well on all bands from 80 to 6 meters. On 75, I switch back and forth between it and the inverted vee and usually find that one or the other works better for a given distance. I don't have an antenna designed for 6 meters, but I have found that the loop does a most excellent job on that band.
