ARROW Communications Association

Nov. 7, 2007
Friday night I dashed home from work with perhaps an hour of daylight to spare. My experience fighting with the HF9v the day before paid off, though. I moved the clamp back to where it had been before, adjusted the base coil to better compensate for soil quality, and, in an hour or so, managed to get 80, 40, 30, and 15m working quite well. 20m was pretty bad, as before I took the antenna down at my old house the nearby oak tree had grown to where it could bash the antenna, and had broken off half the T-like capacitance device - a 20"-or-so by half inch piece of aluminum - and broken half of it off. So I didn't expect 20m to tune very well. Since it was dark I quit, satisfied that at least I had three of the four important bands I needed for the SSCW the next day.

Saturday AM I got the house around 9, and my two young helpers showed up to help. (18-22 year olds will work hard for $10/hour and occasional food, and these young men, along with other of my kids friends, had helped me a great deal during the fixup of my old house and the moving of stuff to storage and then to the new house.)

I got out my old vertical triband dipole, the driven element from a Cushcraft A3 I had had pulled vertically into the top of the forementioned oak tree in the back yard of the old house. I assembled it to the marks I had used before and we carried it into the woods where I selected a *very* tall tree with minimal branches and leaves (it was almost bare at this time of year, compared with adjacent oak trees).

The first few casts with the 1 ounce weight were off target, but proved this was exactly the right weight to use - I far exceeded the tops of the 100+ foot trees on each cast. Finally I got it over the tree I wanted, and we were able to pull a rope over it, but had to tie three lengths of rope together to do it. And the knots caused difficulty getting this done - foreshadowing things to come.

My helpers had to leave, so I worked on, SSCW only hours away. I got the dipole off the ground with great struggles, working in the middle of brush piles where the previous owners had tossed any branches that fell in their yard, and clearing a wide variety of kids' balls, a dead battery, a table leg, and assorted other trash they had left out there. (Disgusting!)

But the rope hung up, and the antenna was dangling, perhaps 6' off the ground, at the end of perhaps a hundred feet of vertical rope. Nothing would move it further, even though I wrapped the rope around a smaller tree a couple of times and pulled on it by wrapping a screwdriver handle in the rope and putting my full weight on it. I was killing myself and getting nowhere.

So I switched the antenna to the other end of the rope and tried to get it up again. Again a knot stopped me, and the antenna was now swinging, vertical, about 10' feet off the ground. But the contest was coming up soon, so I had to live with it.

I had waterproofed every possible spot already, so I dashed inside and tested the antenna. 10m was very good, and 15m so-so, but 20m was not good. I had to lower it twice more and adjust it, but it just wouldn't tune well on 20m. I hope it doesn't have a damaged trap - it had been up in the little oak tree at the old house for several years with the traps sealed with bathtub caulk because I had gotten tired of emptying the water ouf of them each Spring - it made the darned thing perform badly, as you might expect.

Finally I got 20m just under 3:1 SWR and gave up. Now for the contest ...