I was up my tower today in the nice wx to realign some antennas that were twisted on the mast and saw the remains of a massive Hornets Nest under my top plate. Wow, that would have been an unpleasant climb with a quick descent had I gone up there before the big windstorm blew their nest off the tower. I also fixed my 160m antenna and made 60 QRP Qs this weekend to check it out – and to make sure our big guns XX and AN had the RI multiplier in their logs. Purely S&P with such low power and interesting which stations can hear and which can’t. Worked as far West as MO. I will send in my paper log later on for what the puny score is worth. 73, Chris
Chris: TNX for the Q in the contest. And 60 Qs via QRP is no slouch effort. Nice going. Great tower photo and glad you did not get a bee in your bonnet…errrrh…..I mean hard hat. You probably know this, but you can transcribe your paper log online for Cabrillo submission at: http://www.b4h.net/cabforms/
73!
Thanks John for the encouragement. The Hornets built their nest attached under the top plate and partially around the mast and out to one side of the tower. It was somewhere in size between a basketball and a beachball. After the high winds that we had I saw many pieces of what had been a large Hornet nest on the ground, but wasn’t sure where it had been until I climbed up there to re-align the twisted 40m rotary dipole and could then see the remains of the nest’s attachment points. During the storm I went out to the shack and turned the rotator to align the long elements along with the direction of the wind, and that probably broke part of their nest free of its anchor point on the mast – and then the winds did the rest. Perfect day for climbing though, a quick fix, and good exercise for ski season too…73, Chris
Chris,
60 QRP Qs on 160M is very impressive! Glad the winds didn’t do any damage and even more so that the hornets’ nest was destroyed. That things was pretty massive! 73, Pat, NG1G
Thanks Pat! I didn’t bother firing up the computer, so 30 lines on a paper log sheet and I stopped at 2 log sheets worth of stations that could hear me. For a storm that was forecasted with little more caution than “it will be windy” we had higher winds out here in Foster at 600′ AMSL than Irene, Sandy, and the Halloween storms! We lost power for two days and lived off generator power, Internet died within 4 hours as the battery back-up ran out at the Verizon hut, around 20 trees came down on the part of our property where they were in our way, my 7 beam VHF/UHF beam stack on the rooftop tower got all twisted in different directions, the 40m rotary dipole was twisted 45 degrees on the freestanding tower, 160m wire antenna came down, and we lost our driveway gate which was just hanging on with some rot in one of the gate posts. The gate was the biggest deal as that triggered a full replacement. The trees were nothing I couldn’t clear in an hour with my saw and front-loader, and now with yesterday’s climb the antennas are all straightened out. The really good thing that came out of the storm was not having to deal with that huge Hornets up at the top of the tower!