Hi Everyone,

Louis' antenna story reminds me of what happened about 30 years ago when I
was putting up a three element beam on the top of a 64 foot tower at my qth.
I was working on this project in the evening after I got home from work
while it was still light out and I wanted to get it done as I had a schedule
I wanted to keep in a few minutes.  I pulled up the beam and everything went
well until I tried to anchor the beam to the mast mounted on the rotator.
Every time I would try to insert the u bolts through the mast bracket, the
wind would blow and
miss align the holes.  The wind was not that heavy and there was no problem
because the beam was being held in position by a rope through a pulley and I
had a tower belt on.  But my neighbor thought that I must have been in
mortal danger.  She suddenly yelled,
"drop it, save yourself!".  Well, I started laughing so hard, that I almost
let go of the beam.  A couple of minutes later, I secured the beam and
finished taping the coax down and then came down to keep my schedule.

I did make one resolution after that incident, however.  Now, I do all of my
tower work after dark, I don't need daylight to work on antennas!
Bob Tinney, K8LR, [log in to unmask]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Kim Kline" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2004 7:36 PM
Subject: RE G5RV Antennas


Hi to all.
. . .
That reminds me of one humorous story.  The first year that I had the
inverted vees up, we had a major ice storm that brought trees down, did a
fair amount of damage to the house, and of course damaged the mast for my
inverted vee antennas.  Well, in true amateur spirit, I was up on top of
the barn putting the antennas back together again, even if it was a cob
together job on the following Saturday.  Our church secretary saw me up
there and had a fit to think of a blind man climbing around on a barn roof
putting antennas back up.  She called up a family member up and complained,
but I pretty much looked upon it as if I don't go out and put it up, no one
else is going to.

Anyway, I lived with my cob together job a bit longer than I should have,
and about the middle of December of the following year, the mechanical
splice that I made developed enough corrosion that the connection was no
longer reliable, and with each wind gust, I could see my SWR jump.  I
called a friend and fellow ham who had moved to a house that was a little
over a mile away, and asked if I could borrow his butane fired soldering
iron to resolder the connection.  He came down to the house, and we hauld
the antenna down and cleaned up the wire.  But, when we tried to solder the
wire, every time we would try to solder it, the wind would blow the butane
soldering iron out.  So, there were the two of us, up on the barn roof,
trying to figure out how we were going to solder a connection that was in a
location where we couldn't get electricity to use a conventional soldering
gun.  My solution was to crouch up wind from him, and spread my coat open
as wide as I could to block the wind so that he could solder the
connection.  Welol, as you might guess, that same church secretary was
going down the road and almost drove off of it!  She later said that it
looked like I was getting ready to fly south for the winter!  It's too bad
we didn't have someone with a camera to take a picture of it for QST.

Anyway, for the fellow who was asking about adding more wire to load it on
160 meters, let me assure you that you most assuredly can, and it does
work.  I used an LDG Electronics AT-11 auto tuner to get the antenna to
load on 160 meters, as the Kenwood AT-450 (the auto tuner used in the
TS-690S) does not cover 160 meters.  I had generally good results on all
bands except 10 meters.

73, de Lou K2LKK



Louis Kim Kline
A.R.S. K2LKK
Home e-mail:  [log in to unmask]
Work e-mail:  [log in to unmask]
Work Telephone:  (585) 697-5753