My antennas are up. I have poured the base for a 40' Rohn 25G. The hole for the base was dug 3'x3'x5'. The 1.5 yards of concrete, 500 lbs of gravel and 120 feet of 1/2" rebar make up the base. A 4'x4'x6" thick pad finishes off the base. The pad is intentionally wider on one side to provide for a base for my portable generator. The house brackets in the picture above were installed to maintain the tower in a level condition during base construction. They will remain in place to give the tower as much stability as possible. The tower is guyed at the 40 foot level with Phillystran guy wire. I really want this tower to stay vertical!! A Hazer H2 system is installed to allow the antennas to be dropped for maintainence and during bad weather. So far 60 mph winds have not even caused the tower to visably sway.

The window well to the right of the tower leads to the shack. An MFJ4603 connector panel mounted in the shack window brings the coaxial cables in. A series of 5 ground rods tie the system ground to the radials installed in the back yard. A Georgia Copper ground plate is used as the system star ground point.

I installed a Cushcraft A3/A743, D3W an 80 meter dipole (ladder line fed) and a 160M loaded wire ( ladder fed ). The 80M dipole is set up to feed optionally as a T-Vertical through some unique relay arrangements and 32 ea 40' to 130'radials. I have a 6M double bazooka up on the side of the tower at about 30 feet. For satellite work, I use a pair of M2 eggbeaters and an MFJ KP2-440 preamp. For HF, I currently run a Flex 5000 with a Heathkit SB220 amplifier. All HF antennas feed through a Palstar HF-Auto tuner. For Satellite, I run a pair of Yaesu FT857D's.

Grounding was placed high up in the priority list. Radio Works RF line isolators were placed between the rig and amp and between the amp and tuner. 1" braid joins the ground rods (a total of 5) to the Georgia Copper ground plate in the house. All equipment connects to the ground plate with 1/2" braid. So far no tvi or rfi to anything in my house!!! Polyphaser lightening arrestors are used in all coaxial lines, a Wireman sparkplug type lightening arrestor was used in the ladder line.

I run SSTV, JT65, RTTY, PSK31, V4CHAT, CW and phone. I use FLDIGI, JT65-HF, MMTTY, MMSSTV, MVARI, MULTIPSK, MIXW, and PC-ALE for software. I use DXLabs for control and logging. DDUTIL, VAC 4.11 and VSPManager round out the interconnection to the Flex.

Ron

WM9Q (ex-KK7Z)

The mess I call a shack. or is it the shack I call a mess!!?!!

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