Early on the morning of Saturday, October the 16th, a crowd of club members met at the home of Jim Bowman, KS1J, to help him finalize the project that he has been working on for months. Jim had a new four element SteppIR (40m thru 6 m) that wanted to get up on the tower. The temperature was in the high 40s and the wind was whipping out of the northwest.

Jim has already assembled the SteppIR which included the 40 meter element and it seemed like it took up most of the back yard. However, in all cases like this, there was still several things needing to be done, not the least of which was figuring out how to get the 108 pound, 4 element beam, with a 32 foot boom and 34 foot long elements up to the top of the tower.

 

It was determined that the best way to get the 108 pound beam up to the mast was to rig a tram wire from a tree across the yard to the mast. Here are a couple of pictures showing the preparations.

And here is the other end of the tram wire…

 

Jim, KS1J, making the final inspections before hauling the beam up the tram wire.

I had to leave before I remembered to take a picture of the beam atop the tower, so I came back a few days later after Jim had cranked the tower up to its fifty-two feet (or so) height. Jim has reported that when he first attempted to put some RF into the beastie, he got HUGE SWR indications. However, when he plugged the coax from the beam directly into the back of the tranceiver, it was normal (or should I say, nominal). Later searching resulted in a trashed elbow connector on his manual coax switch. Jim reports that everything is working now as it should.

Here’s the SteppIR up in the air in Barrington, RI.

That’s All, Folks…

73,

Ken Wagner K3IU