Wow - that's Windy!

Well,

We had quite a storm in the UK yesterday; luckily I wasn't at home to witness it else I would have been in a real panic I would imagine! Anyhow, the winds were extreme to say the least and this morning I look up at the main antenna and I see this:

The top of the mast is at a definite angle compared to the rest of it, so I turned the antenna to the West - this is the direction I point it when I want to tip it over - looking up again once it was turned that way and everything looked fine! Hmmm, something not so clever here. I started to drop the tower and the antennas all started turning as gravity wanted them to. It seemed that the stub mast to the rotator from the main mast was no longer attached to the square section at all!

Here's what I found when I brought the tower down:

So the three bolts I used as part of the re-engineered top of the tower from back here:

http://g0mgx.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/changes-at-top.html

have snapped clean off. The power of the wind is amazing.

So I've put it back together with some suitable modifications; hopefully this won't happen again.

Scary, egh?

I've finally sacked him for being useless!

Well,

You may remember the trauma I sustained trying to stop the back of the house and the sitting area below getting constantly covered in bird ****.

At the bottom of this post was where I recruited the services of Oliver the Owl:

http://g0mgx.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/top-band-what-happens-there-then.html

Oliver has proved to be quite useless apart from serving as a great vantage point for the birds to perch... so today I have finally got round to getting rid of him.

Instead I asked on one of the eHam forums here:

http://www.eham.net/ehamforum/smf/index.php/topic,90940.0.html

and as a result have got some mirror finished plastic stuff and some garden twine and have ended up with this:

If you look closely you will see that there are five shiny mirrored things suspended between the two antennas.

Time will tell, but I think I might have cracked it!

Sneaky, egh?