Pushing the limits of the Yaesu control cable length and mechanical strength. This video was recorded last Saturday (19th Oct) with Mike M0MSN and myself.
https://www.youtube.com/@mike-M0MSN
Last time out, we had a successful first lift and have had it guyed and upright for a week before fitting trying to fit the control cables for the rotator.
Before that, we broke the Create Rotator. We fished out the Yaesu G-450 and did a successful "launch" with a 6:1 pulley.
This is a 12m tower project for an HF Yagi / Quad etc. long story.. *BUT* the guys are dual-use as both a 40m 4-Square switchable antenna array – as well as the tower. ALl lines will be replaced with Dyneema after we’ve sorted it all out.
There will be 4 vertical antennas coming off each guy point. Accuracy is mandatory for both the 4-square (impedance matching and gain etc) and you’ll see shortly in another video why they need to be spot on because when we move to a non-stretch Dyneema rope, all 4-guys need to have same tension when the tower is lowered and raised.
Further, the tower needs to be totally detuned from 40m so we have a fibreglass insulator to change the resonance to around 9MHz. We COULD add a further insulator above the rotator to move that to about 24MHz. More of that in later video. There will be a temporary yagi going up on the top of this tower which will give me time to develop the multi-band quad antenna.
The rotator will eventually be replaced. The vertical force specification on the G450 is 200Kg. I broke the Create RC5-1 which had double that. There are no sideways loads on the base of the tower so I only need to worry about vertical loads.
The start of the construction is here: https://youtu.be/SbMy_82XRDM
"Part 1" is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_pQN0pMvmA
The "disaster" video is here: https://youtu.be/4eiEd00N5GU
We covered the planning of this tower on a previous video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmgUGuoudb4
We also made a video about Quads – which is the target of this tower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r9ff32j9Yo
And here is some information about 4-Square antennas which will surround the tower (tower will be de-tuned off 40m): https://youtu.be/joWUH2PgGZg
The NEXT video in this series is when we fit the top of the tower, fit all the lines (ropes), add an extra guy-point and make the tower fully operational – as well as site the 4-vertical elements (non functional currently until we connect it).
The next video after that one in this series is to make a temporary yagi mono-bander for 20m and fire at USA. Then finally, rotator cable, ethernet, control wires etc up the pole.
Finally, we will lay the radials down for the 4-square and connect up the control box.