Been busy the week before Easter with some antenna work. Weather was just awful with heavy storms and even snow on two mornings! So I prepared the new 6/4 m Dualband Yagi indoors and could only mount it on Good Friday thanks to the help of Heiko, DG1BHA. It’s now where the 10/6 m Dualband Yagi used to be. Unfortunately the 1/2″ coax cable is broken, must be water in there somewhere. 🙁 Of course I left all my cable reserves back here in Cologne so 700 km away. Oh well … will prepare a new one before going up to the station again beginning of May and change the cable then. The new antenna has a bit more gain on 6 m than the old one and also offers 4 m, both on the same 5 m boom. Keeping fingers crossed German RegTP will allow us to work 4 m again this summer! Would be great to gain some experience on that band, too. 😉
We also used the time to dismount the old 5 ele 6 m Yagi on top the 20 m Yagi and repair it. Brought it up above the 15 m Yagi then. On top of the 20 m beam is now a 17/12 m Dualband Yagi. We had to use the existing other antennas (i.e. the 10 m Yagi on 12 m) and match them to put out a signal on these two WARC bands somehow. Believe me, having just 2 resonant elements on both bands now is a night and day difference compared to the matched somethings from before. 😉
Although I once again missed to pack the camera (doh!) I took some photos of Heiko doing all the heavy lifting on the masts using an old smartphone. Left shows him just finished with mounting the new WARC beam and now fixing the coax up on the 9 m high platform. Right shows him up above the 15 m beam (on a 15 m boom) mounting the old 5 ele 6 m Yagi (4.5 m boom) normally used by Uwe.
I also took a short video clip of Heiko preparing the ropes to get the 6 m beam up for mounting above the 15 m beam. Just to show some dimensional comparison. 😉 And it was quite windy, too!
So quite some work done in the 3 days that we could use weather-wise. After changing out the coax in 3 weeks I hope we can “just use” everything for a while then. Time to think about additional stuff now, isn’t it? 😉