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Finished the installation today. Still have to test it in it's new position and connect it to the house cable, but I was pretty much done in by the time we finished getting it hung and it was time to eat anyway... This 'getting old' shit ain't for sissies. Hopefully get it checked out Tuesday afternoon, tomorrow's schedule is already full.
I have the bottom of the 10' mast up about 6", so the base of the antenna is about 9'6" off the ground.
We found it best to connect the antenna to the tripod first, and then later to the mast before raising it. The antenna is just too awkward to handle with 20' extended above the highest point one can reach/try to control the antenna from. The first attempt was each of us standing on 6' step ladders trying to get the antenna onto the adapter plate on the temporary mast in the tripod (only 5 feet off the ground), which was quite an unsuccessful struggle for a couple old men. We then laid the tripod over and attached the antenna the the short 'test mast', then raised it as an assembly. We did the same thing when we attached it to the 10' x 1" permanent mast and it was much easier to control than our first attempt.
I will say I thought sure we would end up with the main mast of the antenna buckling and kinking when we were raising it due to the cantilevered weight. It is very difficult to support the long antenna hanging out behind you as you walk it up, so all of the stress/weight is right where your hands are pushing it up. We used a 6' squeegee as a prop to help push upward, but there are still certain times the antenna is unsupported and at risk of buckling and it held up fine.
To set up the guy lines, I used a hose clamp around the center section, with cable ties doubled around the hose clamp at 0o, 90o, 180o and 270o, then looped some 1/8" Dacron line through the cable ties. The guy lines were a little difficult to sort out once the antenna was raised, and we had been pretty careful to lay them out the way we thought they should go. I eventually had to go get binoculars to see which line should be in what position. The bottom line is that when you raise the antenna, the guys all clump together and have to be flipped up over the ends of the tuning rods to index correctly. We spent an inordinate amount of time dicking around with the guy lines, but once we had everything straight, it was easy to guy solidly. It may have been easier if we had 3rd/4th persons to keep the guys sorted as the two of us raised the antenna into position.
After finishing the Titan DX install, I couldn't get my OCFD out of the tree - the suspension line (1/4" Dacron) seems to have grown into a crotch and it wouldn't pull in either direction. I fooled with that for an hour and had to give up for now. The rope passes over a 4" horizontal limb, then through a crotch in a 4" horizontal limb 4 feet away, which is about 40 feet AGL, so there's no way to safely reach it. Might have to get the truck involved...or a rifle. I had hoped to re-purpose the coax for the new vertical, not to mention recovering a relatively expensive store-bought antenna and a bunch of Dacron rope. Supposed to rain here tomorrow, I'll try pull it it down again while it's wet...
Here's the Titan DX's current position:
I'll post test results when I get a chance to wrap this up.
ETA:1) Got my OCFD down, finally. It had grown into the tree crotch pretty solidly and I actually DID have to get the truck involved (as an anchor for the come-along).
I braided together the wires that were hanging from the balun (coax and the two heavy wires that form the dipole legs) to distribute the pulling pressure and wrapped that around an empty wire spool to avoid kinking. I then hooked a come-along to my truck hitch, put a heavy rope through the core of the spool to hook the come-along to and cranked down on the come-along. Put a LOT of tension on it and ran out of come-along cable. I pulled down on the tensioned wires using almost all of my body weight and the rope finally popped loose and slid through the crotch. Resistance to pulling the rest of the rope through was pretty substantial, but I did get everything down without damaging anything. I was surprised and really thought I'd tear the connector off the coax. The suspension rope was 1/4" Dacron and the part that had bonded to the tree literally tore loose and there was a notch in the rope about 10% of the way through.
2) Once I got the OCFD down and tested the coax good, I hooked everything up, but then had problems when testing from back inside the shack. Open circuit indication. Fooled with it awhile and found that one of my older MFJ coax switches has developed a problem with one of the contacts and it was an open circuit. Swapped a barrel connector for the switch and was in business. I'll open the switch housing up later and see what's wrong...knowing MFJ, something probably fell apart inside.
3) Compared to the test run on the tripod on the driveway, SWR had improved on all bands once erected in it's final position. My highest SWR on any band was 2.7:1 (80m) and in many spots I had between 1:1 and 1.5:1.
I was using my RSPDuo SDR to look at signals, so I didn't transmit. The bad coax switch was used to select between the SDR and my TS590s and I didn't have time to swap cables on the barrel connector last night. I have another switch and will put that in line and probably try to TX some tonight.
It did seem like these was an increase in background noise over the OCFD, which I had expected. Everything else seemed to come through better too, so it's probably all good. Got hooked up and working just in time to hear a Panama station and a northern Spain station coming through at 59.