W1WBB GETS NEW WIRES

Bill Bliss, W1WBB, wanting to improve the contest scores he contributes to the club, is upgrading his wire antennas and has an 88 foot center-fed doublet that needed halyards high up in the trees, so he asked for help. Once again, John, W1XX, (aka RI’s Robin Hood) packed up his trusty bow and arrows and drove across the state to help out a club member. John prefers early mornings for his work to minimize the impact of any breezes that may come up during the day. So at 8:00 on Sunday morning, the 16th of May, John, W1XX, and Ken, K3IU, met Bill at his QTH in Portsmouth to hang another antenna. Bill has many old, tall trees in his yard and he had picked out the two trees he wanted to use for this antenna. He had not, however, expected to have the halyards completely over the top of the trees, and, never having worked with John before, didn’t know that John didn’t shoot arrows half way up a tree. John is an over-the-top kind of guy.

W1WBB supervising whilst W1XX Lines Up The Shot


After extensive technical discussion and debate over a cup of coffee, it was time to proceed. Since Bill had not anticipated that we would shoot the halyard over the tree tops, he hadn’t bought as much of the black halyard as would be needed to get both ends of the antenna up in the air. So, one end is complete and the other end has the messenger line in place, but awaits the arrival of the additional black halyard.

When Bill gets this new antenna up in the air, it will be really up in the air with one end at about 50-55 feet and the other end at about 75-80 feet. He will be able to use this antenna with good results on all bands from 80 through 10 meters. For 160, he still will be using his inverted “L”; that is, unless John and Ken get back over there and help him get a better wire arrangement up for 160.

With this new antenna configuration, Bill, we expect at least a 26.2% increase in your contest scores.

3 comments on “W1WBB GETS NEW WIRES

  1. This was “fairly” easy. Only problem I had was, again, with the images. It wasn’t clear that I had to first, upload images to the server, then select the Gallery, select the image, change properties as necessary, and then add to the posting. That procedure didn’t seem at all intuitive to me, but now that I know how to use the system, it should be no problem.

    You might consider trying a step-by-step procedure to add images. One thing I didn’t try was to adjust the size of the image after it had been inserted into the posting.

    Ken

  2. Since this may make it to public consumption, I removed the extraneous image that I had inserted and adjusted the location of the other image.

    Ken

  3. Re: my comment about adjusting the size of the image… When you are in the Edit Mode, one can select the image, grab a frame button, and adjust the size. There does to be a limit on how much you can re-size the image, but it is adjustable.

    Ken

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