HF Antenna and Tower Raising Parties - July 29/30th 2000
Text and Photos by Robert Monaghan


Joe Rodgers atop SMU Amateur Radio Club's New Tower of RF Power


Mont O'Leary and Joe Rodgers prepare connectors to beam antenna


Joe Rodgers and Mont O'Leary mount coax on HF Beam Antenna


Taking a Break in 100 Degree Heatwave - Joe Rodgers, Tony Klinkert, Mont O'Leary


Robert Monaghan (with intravenous 64 ounce Cola feed) and Joe Rodgers
(You can see why I do the photos and Joe does the climbing!! ;-)
[Photo courtesy of Tony Klinkert, Supergulp courtesy of 7/11 ;-)]


Joe Rodgers prepares an RF choke for the HF Beam Antenna


HF Beam Antenna is nearly as tall as the new Tower of RF Power!
A pulley and gin-pole make pulling up the antenna slightly easier than it looks...


HF Beam Antenna gets pulled into balanced weight position on rotator
Safety Belt and ropes used to take up much of the weight makes job easier


Tony and Mont help pull the HF beam up while Joe setups up mounting hardware


HF Beam (with RF choke and matching network) with Joe adjusting rotator mounting


Tony and Mont use Ginpole to help lift weight of antenna up while Joe aligns mounting hardware


Joe positions antenna mounting to rotator while Ginpole takes the weight


Joe tightens hardware - note size of beam antenna elements


Joe has the first clamp in place on the main beam antenna


With second clamp in place, the antenna is now officially "up"


Worm's eye view of antenna raising from 30 feet below


Joe wraps waterproofing tape around antenna connection
Note how connector on RF choke makes it easy to attach cabling


Heat shrink tubing on the cabling is heated to form protective seal


Not a bad day's work, all in all - but Sunday is another day!!!

Six Meter Beam Raising Pages

Discussion

Raising a new tower and a pair of large beam antennas is a major event in the life of any amateur radio club station. New towers and beam antennas seem to come along every 15 or 20 years, just like the generations of new students. So we have made a major effort to document this tower raising party, secure in the hope that it will represent a new foundation for our Southern Methodist University W5YF amateur radio station's future success.

A second reason for documenting such a project is to share with new and future members some of our efforts, along with some of the tricks of the trade I have learned in this project. See also our Six Meter Beam Raising Pages for related tips and tricks observed during raising of that major Six Meter Beam Antenna on Sunday, July 30th, 2000 AD. We also had some inquiries from other clubs about our tower raising project and planned approach, so perhaps these photos and text will suggest some options and ideas of "how-to-do-it"?

New Tower

Our club advisor, Dr. Milt Gosney, deserves a great deal of credit in arranging for the old difficult to climb and ultra-heavy steel pipe tower to be replaced by the new and easier to climb standard tower sections. It took a University crane and torch crew to remove the heavy old tower without damaging the new two year old roof, for which we are also grateful!

This changeover also made it easier to get standard tower mounting hardware such as the rotator mounting plates, rather than have to create custom machined mounts for the old non-standard tower. My point here is that a major secret to making this project feasible was the change in tower construction arranged for this project (under Club President Tony Klinkert's direction and efforts).

Tower Guywire and Rotator Party

Preliminary work for this antenna raising project included refurbishing and checking over of the HF beam antenna by Joe Rodgers. A major members project was repositioning one of the guy wires on the new tower. At the same time, we also mounted the rotator into a standard mounting plate and positioned it on the tower. A rotator mast of heavy hardened steel was also put into place. The rotator was tested with the rotator box prior to mounting. The rotator was tested once again when in place on its mounting bracket in the tower. All of this work had to be done on a prior weekend's project to prepare the way for this late July 2000 weekend antenna raising party.

One of the lessons learned at the rotator raising party was to avoid scheduling a mid-morning starting time at the height of our Texas 100 degree heatwave period. I did my best to look like a sunburned Maine lobster after this preliminary 10am to late afternoon tower project. So we scheduled this followup project for 2 pm, expecting to do preliminary work during the hottest period, and get the antenna up during the less fierce later afternoon. A number of clouds came along in the late afternoon too as hoped from the weather reports, helping to make it easier to look up without being blinded. But we knew we would probably only be able to get the HF beam antenna up in the available 5 or 6 hour work period.

In the event, this was an accurate prediction, but we decided to complete the six meter beam assembly and mounting on the tower on Sunday. Here again, we planned the session for early Sunday morning, and again beat the afternoon heat (well, most of it anyway). Part of the reason to come back was to make it easier to complete the six meter beam project and tower climbing project while critical workers like Joe Rodgers were available. Another desire was to have the project completed when our club advisor, Dr. Milt Gosney, returned from a trip in mid-August. And we also had a good bit of enthusiasm after seeing the major project of the HF beam in place too!

Antenna Raising Party People and Skill Sets

Club members are a major part of the resources of any club. In this, we are especially fortunate in having a club member and former W5YF club president, Joe Rodgers, who has a great deal of professional tower and antenna installation experience. Similarly, we are privileged to enjoy the support of experienced local amateurs such as Mont O'Leary (of the Dallas Amateur Radio Club or DARC board, and noted ATVer...). Taken together, these kinds of resource people provide the experience, special skills, and specialty tools needed to succeed in such major club projects.

Club president Tony Klinkert brings both his telecom and managerial expertise, along with a willingness to push the required paperwork through SMU's bureaucracy. His enthusiasm is clearly shown by his new status as an amateur extra class holder - congratulations on that achievement, Tony!

As a past SMU amateur rado club president and SMU telecom graduate, I also bring a mix of practical and technical skills. Part of my interest is in using photography and the world wide web to document and share our club's achievements with a new generation of club members. One positive side effect has been rediscovering our club's past, thanks to former members contacting us after seeing these web pages. Most recently, we discovered one person who was literally there at the beginning of our club in the late 1920s. So I am bemused that the latest projects and technology of the WWW are eliciting our lost club's history from the 1920s. If this applies to you, please contact me so we can add your contributions to our club's history!

Lessons Learned

The photos above document many of the tricks and tips to be learned and used in such an antenna raising project. As an engineer, I found myself especially impressed with how useful the simple tools like a pulley on a Ginpole and rope could be in raising antennas. A seemingly impossible task was rendered do-able, thanks to these ancient engineering techniques.

Another series of tricks are aimed at preserving the antenna cabling from deterioration from moisture. Use of waterproofing silicon tape, along with heat shrink tubing, make these connections much more watertight than simply electrical taped and silicon sealer connections I have used in the past.

Another trick is to provide a connector at an easy to reach point on the beam antenna, rather than trying to raise the antenna with cabling in place or put on the cabling after the fact. By fashioning a simple coil as a RF choke, the RF energy is discouraged from trying to go back down the unbalanced coax towards the radio shack.

This simple setup makes it easy to replace the RF cable to the antenna with minimal effort, simply by replacing the cable run from the radio shack to the top of the tower. Since cable lying on a flat roof may end up spending much time sitting in standing moisture (from rain, snow), the cable tends to get compromised long before the antenna is in need of replacement. So this setup should make it much easier for future replacement cables to be run without having to dismount the antenna or its rotator.

The use of a safety belt is an obvious necessity for safety. But one of the tricks I observed Joe use was a series of loops around a projecting top pipe (see six meter beam pages for more photos). By using a series of loops, as with a series of loops around a pipe when knot-tying, there is far less tendency to slip. The careful routing of safety belts around obstructions like guy wires and cabling by an expert like Joe Rodgers has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

An important observation will be about having the right tools for the job. Thanks to Joe and Mont's skills with their collection of specialty tools and antenna measuring instruments, we were able to do many tasks with speed and confidence. A small but very hot gas powered soldering iron made it easy to quickly solder connections without allowing enough heat to build up to soften or melt the cable insulation. The use of a specialty tool to cut the cable to precise dimensions for fitting the cables is another fine point. We even had a tool for grinding and shaping the tip of the center coaxial cable conductor to mount on a shaped hollow central connector pin.

Not all tools are complicated or expensive. I made one trip to the W5YF shack to bring up a heavy round steel bar about 2 1/2 feet long. Used with a rooftop ladder (used for adjusting the microwave dishes), the bar went thru the center of our new but very heavy roll of coaxial cable. With the ladder open and the coaxial cable mounted between a step rung and the rear support crossbars, the roll of coax could freely rotate on its central steel bar. As a result, there was no kinking of the cable while trying to unravel and unwind it from the roll. Simple, but highly effective. The resulting cable runs are perfectly flat, with no tendency to rotate nor stresses from improper unrolling. Moreover, you can easily pull off a few hundred feet of cable with a minimal and direct pulling effort.

Success!

Thanks to Mont's skills with an antenna testing instrument, we were able to verify the operation and SWR of our new HF and 6 meter beam antennas immediately after connecting a connector in the W5YF radio station shack. The 10 and 15 meter and WARC bands showed particularly low SWRs, which was somewhat higher on 20 meters (possibly due to the new antennas height above the heavily grounded roof?). The new 6 meter beam antenna was also precisely tuned to the low end of the band with a very good 1 to 1.1 SWR, rising to 1 to 1.3 over the desired low end. As noted on the six meter beam raising pages, this happy ending was the result of Tony Klinkert's directions in following the precise assembly instructions for the 6 meter beam antenna. When in doubt, read the manual!

Future Projects

A finalized run of multiconductor rotator cable has to be wired up using our tested wiring diagram and run to the rotator at the top of the tower. The tower and rotator have already been tested using a short wiring segment and powered up. Moreover, the antenna beams and rotator have already been aligned, so this project should be rather modest compared to the antenna rotator party and HF beam antenna raising parties.

We also began the wiring of a 2 meter and 420 Megahertz vertical antenna close to the club station, thereby minimizing the loss in the antenna coaxial lines. This setup will be used with a planned new dual VHF band radio, which will also be used for radio amateur satellite work.

Thanks to Mont O'Leary's expertise in amateur television, we were able to determine an optimal point for a short standalone tower base very near the W5YF radio station rooftop cable access port (an upside down U-shaped pipe to the roof whose shape keeps out water and snow). Amateur television stations use low power (e.g., 70 milliwatts, that's 70 thousandths of one watt, not 70 thousand watts!). So it is critical to have short antenna cable runs so little power is lost in the cable runs. We were able to ensure that we would have excellent line of sight linkup with the AB5IG amateur television repeater atop a bank building in downtown Dallas. This setup will enable out 70 milliwatt signal to reach out over 60 miles in the north Texas area. Club president Tony Klinkert is processing the required purchase of tower base and transmitter antenna items needed. Fortunately, these antennas at 1.2 and 2.4 gigahertz are rather small and light, and can be mounted a few yards off the rooftop, making putting them up an easy afternoon project.

Another future project is assembly of the 2 meter antenna by the same makers of our 6 meter beam. Hopefully, our experiences in assembling the one will carry over in easing assembly of the other? With this 2 meter beam, we will be able to do a great deal of VHF work on 2 meters, including amateur radio satellite projects as well as longer distance CW code and SSB voice transmissions. Again, the rotator and tower base are in place, but need refurbishing and cabling to the new 2 meter beam antenna to work. However, this work can be done mainly at roof top level, simply putting up the light weight beam antenna on an aluminum mast into the rotator mount on the roof mounted tower base.

A final antenna project is the dipole antenna for 80 thru 10 meters, which will require cabling and connectors to its 4 to 1 balun transformer. The antenna also needs to be mounted, especially its ends, so they are off the roof. The roof has extensive lightning protection grounds running on it in a grid fashion, so antenna height above this ground is critical to high frequency antenna efficiency and performance.

The major non-antenna and non-rooftop projects have to do with membership drive during September (possibly at the club and volunteer group day in the SMU student center for incoming students?). Another project is creating a new club QSL card, which the SMU printshop can evidently produce in quantity for us. We also have plans to sell off some of our surplus and older equipment and buy newer gear. See our gear for sale pages for photos of planned sale items. These monies from sales on EBAY and locally will hopefully help fund new radios and amateur television equipment to match our new antenna farm capabilities!

Conclusion

Personally, I am delighted that thanks to the efforts of Dr. Gosney, Tony Klinkert, Luther Pulley, Joe Rodgers, Mont O'Leary, and many other folks at SMU and in our community, we have been able to refurbish our antenna farm thus far - with high hopes for completing a great antenna farm shortly. We now have the potential to serve as a great amateur radio club station for the community of Southern Methodist University.

But I hope we can do more. I would like to see us provide a community resource, tying in with the many amateur radio hobby types who are also engineers and technical people (many of them graduates of SMU). SMU's engineering school is looking for ways to reach out to the broader Dallas technical community, including SMU alumni, and an amateur radio station is one way to do that. For our incoming students, I hope we can provide amateur radio licensing courses under the new licensing programs now coming into place. And I hope we can work with the Dallas Amateur Radio Club and other local groups to extend and support the development of amateur radio in the greater Dallas area....

Email suggestions, updates, comments, links, and glitches to fix - Thanks!