Sorry about the title of this article. Some of us are in our 50's you know 😛
Just a quick update on our progress on Thursday morning at the clubhouse, for those that haven't heard via the nets over the last couple of days.
Aerialbeam were once again in attendance and did all the scary ladder-based antics, while some of us were faffing with the antenna itself trying to find a definitive fault that we could attribute the recent problems to.
It's had a rough time up there, and we found a few things. Fortunately, the coax itself didn't reveal any further teeth marks or similar damage, so I don't know what that was all about. That would have been bad news. We found that the PL259 at the impedance transformer was hanging on by a thread, and the counterpoise fell off as we were lowering it, so we beefed both of those things up. I can only think that the plug has been stressed by having the coax taped to the supporting mast with zero slack before the strain-relief loop was added during the last maintenance operation, and that nobody noticed. Who knows? No point speculating, but it looks good until the next problem!
More self-amalgamating tape was applied, and as we didn't have any silicon grease available, Stella donated her lip-balm stick in a fetching shade of pink to help in the anti-corrosion battle.
We also found a discernible amount of water inside the transformer. Only a few drops, but not ideal. That's what happens when you drill holes in an IP65 enclosure. I like the small pressure compensation valves below in dealing with this problem (my enclosures are all bone-dry)...
but we didn't have any to hand, and I think that Phil G4UDU is toying with the idea of potting the whole thing up the next time around (and there will be a next time). I've never seen this done on one of these fairly hefty 2.4" toroid-based transformers, so that will be interesting. We settled for putting a tiny drain hole in the bottom of the box (I think - I didn't see it actually happen).
Ultimately, we ran out of time before the rigger had to be on another job, so although we had to drop the coil-end of the element to give us enough slack to lower the transformer at the other end to head-height, we didn't have time to trim that extension. We should be able to do this ourselves at a later date, as it's tied-off only just out of reach.
Phil also took away the external antenna relay with a view to either modifying it, or replacing it with an upgraded version. I think he wants to test it with 100+ Watts through it to make sure it'll stand up to my evil data transmissions. Consequently, the 'antenna' virtual switch on the eWeLink app does nothing, so anyone with access to the app should just leave this switched to the 'off' position for now.
Thanks to our friends at Aerialbeam once again. You do us proud. Thanks also go to attendees Chris G4ZCS, Mike G8KMP, Merv M0WVE, Stella M6ZRJ, Alan G8YKV and Phil G4UDU, who not only spends a lot of time supporting the club, but also donates a fair amount of hardware out of his own spare-parts bins without anyone even realising.
Well, that's all she wrote. 'Till next time,
Berni M0XYF
