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Sunday 11 December 2011

It's Just Been Far Tooooo Long...

Well,

The job has been getting quite seriously in the way of my play time recently. As inconvenient as it is, I guess there wouldn't be much playtime without the job!

First thing to report is that myself and my mate Vince, G0ORC, took the trek down to ML&S in Surrey for their open day, there site is here:

http://www.hamradio.co.uk

Vince bought all sorts of stuff including a tube linear; the net result is that I have bought his old solid state Almeritron linear from him as his purchase was a replacement:

http://www.ameritron.com/Product.php?productid=ALS-600

It looks like this:


And there's a very heavy matching 50V PSU to go with it:

So the acquisition of this linear has triggered yet another "I haven't got enough space" session in the shack. I've ended up bodging a new shelf to put this on:


So it's all kind of fitted OK.

The second thing to report is that when I was at the ML&S open day, I purchased a replacement for my wire Windom antenna. I picked up a Radio Works Carolina Windom 80 Compact:

What I failed to spot was that the "droop" on the folded element is 15 feet! It's not drawn to scale at all and I ended up in a total pickle.

To start with the existing Windom had got a bit wet in the coax connections; the entire length of coax was shot - how it was working in beyond me - this picture is of the shack end of the line, some 15-20m from where the water is getting in:


So, duff coax plus I managed to destroy the existing antennas line isolator (that's the bit at the bottom of the vertical resonating part) when I unscrewed the connector. 
I now had the existing antenna broken, the new antenna knotted in the trees and clearly never going to fit (with the droops) into my back garden and generally in a total muddle.

I ended up ordering a Windom 80 Special from Walters & Stanton plc:


And finally, after much cursing in the dark after work on a few evenings this week, it's finally up. Just to add to my pain I added a pulley to the pole so (I thought) I wouldn't have to take the whole thing down just to get at the wire antenna. Hah! The pulley and pole acted like a great lever and turned the vertical pole into a banana! Down in all had to come again:


You can just see the matching transformer on the Windom in the picture above. This was after I had adjusted the pulley arm to be more central to the whole thing.

The house is kind of looking like this now, how I don't get complaints I am not too sure:


So all in all, a rather expensive exercise. New antennas (2) and new coax was about £400 all told! I suppose the old antenna had been with me since the mid 90s so it didn't really owe me anything.

Here's the mandatory cat picture:


All looking good, though, egh?

2 comments:

  1. I just bought a new als 600 and it is do sensitve to rf that I can't get it work mor tha an few moments and the rf protection shuts it off!
    Any suggestions on how to reduce the rf?
    49 meter dipole - off center
    reply at aginnjr@gmail.com
    ty for anything
    Ed
    K6MFI

    ReplyDelete
  2. Interesting and useful information that you have provided here on your post.Thanks.

    3g antenna manufacturer & lte antenna manufacturer

    ReplyDelete