AB5SS Observation of UAS photo

, AB5SS, has already keenly spotted some significant items after examine the recent  UAS drone photography.

“… the brackets are clamped to the vertical legs instead of resting on the horizontal braces.  See pic below of how they “should” be installed.  As you might guess, the problem with the way they are installed is they can crimp the legs (although they are thick wall steel tubing), but worse

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Final Hex Tower Work

KJ4QJW, N9RCS, KG5HOK, W5OC spent Saturday May 27, from 9AM-4PM finishing work making coax and control line connections and the guying down of the crank up tower. Using the in-place coax and rotor control wiring which runs from the tower base to inside the shack, Stu, KJ4QJW, terminated the connections at both end and discovered the “missing” connection lines behind the W5RRR service panel.  

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Updated status of Hex Beam build

Mike Vandewalle, N8MTV, offered a helpful hand to put the finishing touches onto the hexbeam project last nite 5/23.

The missing 15m directive and reflective wire element had finally arrived from KIO Technologies and it was carefully installed on the spiderweb-like antenna after the whole antenna was unmounted from the tower and brought back to ground level. 

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Hex beam @ W5RRR

Hex beam project getting real.

Mother’s Day was spent getting up a used K4KIO hex.

The good news:  it unexpected included a 6m capability.

The bad news:  it didn’t come with 15m wires.

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A confessional

Gary, KE5AMW, is a CW guy.  He’s gotten me interested to sharpen my CW skills that have rusted over the years.

I confess– he’s also inspired me to finally learn how to use a CW mechanical Bug, something I’ve put off for years.  I bought this off of eBay a long time ago, but never learned how to key it.

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W5RRR Crankup Tower

KG5HOK devised a cleverly simple u-bolt mounting scheme to get our temporary 50′ crackup tower up for operation.

It will live at the empty concrete slab until we can get the plans (and funds) in place to re-erect the 60′ full sized tower.

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