Ok, who knows if anyone cares but I'm seriously bored at work so you get sucked into it.

This morning I went up one of the radio towers at our Emergency Operations Center to replace a 6M ground plane antenna. It's used to communicate with the Red Cross and since we're officially in hurricane season it's deemed critical. This is me hanging out about 100' above street level. If I fall I'd hit the roof 20-40' below me (depending on which way I fall), get skewered by lightning spikes, or fall into a 6' ventilation fan.



I built the bracket for the antenna and was pleased that everything lined up with the tower legs perfectly.



Unfortunately we couldn't get the SWR down below 7. Checked out the coax with a 2M mag mount and it came in at 1.3 so that eliminated that. I pulled the plug on the install and called the manufacturer. He said he's heard of the same problem only one other time and it was a bad connector. I'm going to see what I can do this weekend or I'll have to have them send me a new connector or return the antenna for repair. It sucked that we didn't get it done.

While I was waiting for my crew to do some work below I snapped this pic. It's an abandoned building and I thought it was funny there are full blown trees growing on the roof. The long, silver object on the roof (the 40' fall one) is a tri-band HF beam. That's the next project. Probably try to knock that out later this month. We have a 6M beam with a 34' boom to install but I'm not sure how I can do two beams together without a crane or lift. We use 6M so little that I only plan on tackling the multi-band.



This is totally unrelated to today's work and I've posted it before but I'm bored so here it is again. This is the last tower job I did during the Blue Angels show. We were in their turn pattern.

Looks like a good day to me. How tall is the tower you were on?

I think it's about 50'. More than 40 less than 60. So I pick 50.

The building is 6 stories and I figure it's another 20 or so feet from the top floor to the roof level. I was mounting the antenna about 25' from the base of the tower.

who makes the 6m antenna?

B Square Engineering

It was pretty much the only vertical antenna I found that specified it would operate on the Red Cross frequency which is below the normal 6M band.

Well, things are looking up. I swapped the connector and while it was higher than I'd hoped I was down from 7 to 2.5 at 47.2. In the ham band I was 1.0 at 50 and 1.8 at 54.

The true test will be how it reads when I put it back on the tower, of course. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.