{"id":2864,"date":"2019-09-27T00:06:54","date_gmt":"2019-09-27T00:06:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coyotearc.net\/?p=2864"},"modified":"2019-09-27T00:06:54","modified_gmt":"2019-09-27T00:06:54","slug":"the-2019-antenna-tower-maintenance-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coyotearc.net\/index.php\/2019\/09\/27\/the-2019-antenna-tower-maintenance-project\/","title":{"rendered":"The 2019<\/b><\/i> antenna\/tower maintenance project"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hot dogs. Chips. Salsa. A truck load of cold water. And, as always: Murphy!<\/p>\n

On Friday September 22 and Saturday September 23 – almost 5 years to the day after erecting our tower and antennas – Jason KS5TX and Erik K5WW finally got around to replacing all the lightning-damaged equipment in and on the tower!<\/p>\n

We had one little helper: an amazing lift from Reno’s Rentals in Uvalde. It allowed Jason to reach over<\/strong> the Spiderbeam and get to the VHF repeater antenna:<\/p>\n

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Jason KS5TX getting ready to remove the faulty repeater antenna.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Good stuff, Reno’s!<\/p><\/div>\n

And yes, the repeater antenna was in worse shape than we thought:<\/p>\n

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The top of the old repeater antenna. Blown to smithereens. Not exactly waterproof anymore either…<\/p><\/div>\n

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Radiating element blasted off its base. Which in itself almost exploded.<\/p><\/div>\n

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We may need a few new capacitors. And some other bits…<\/p><\/div>\n

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Foam standoff. Even this got charred.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Yup. What he said.<\/p><\/div>\n

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He’s dead, Jim.<\/p><\/div>\n

After hooking the new rotator cable and new controller to the old rotator we were able to diagnose it as well. It turned; but we got no feedback for the azimuth indicator. Busted potentiometer, at the very least. Out with the old, in with the new (rotator):<\/p>\n

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Jason KS5TX replacing the defective Yaesu G-450A rotator. Hard on the knees!<\/p><\/div>\n

With the new rotator installed it was time to (literally!) hoist up the new repeater antenna, a Diamond X700HNA<\/a>. It is 24 feet tall, 6 feet taller than the one we had. Here it is on the left, with the old, broken antenna on the right for comparison.<\/p>\n

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Jason, adding another foot and a half.<\/p><\/div>\n

With the new repeater antenna installed it was time for another well-deserved break:<\/p>\n

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Is it hot dog time yet???<\/p><\/div>\n

We didn’t replace the coax for the beam; because it looked and tested fine. But the repeater antenna coax was replaced by LMR-600 coax. The lower loss and taller antenna should give us quite a few extra dBs!<\/p>\n

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Jason doing the final cable management.<\/p><\/div>\n

No photos of Erik K5WW, you say? No, he decided to play official observer at ground level. And pick up a few nuts and washers that got blown out of Jason’s hands.<\/p>\n

Two days of hard, long overdue work in hot and muggy weather. But we had fun; even though unlike 5 years ago we had no fun building<\/em>. In-joke! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

Would you believe we didn’t take any pics of the finished product? Yeah, once the hot dogs started coming in we kinda forgot. But hey: go and have a look; we didn’t move the tower. Better yet: go and use it!<\/p>\n

(all photos \u00a9 of the guy who hates heights, K5WW)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hot dogs. Chips. Salsa. A truck load of cold water. And, as always: Murphy! On Friday September 22 and Saturday September 23 – almost 5 years to the day after erecting our tower and antennas – Jason KS5TX and Erik … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-carc"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotearc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotearc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotearc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotearc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotearc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2864"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/coyotearc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2911,"href":"https:\/\/coyotearc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2864\/revisions\/2911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coyotearc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotearc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coyotearc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}