Posted by
n7ws on
Mar 16, 2009; 3:18pm
URL: http://elecraft.85.s1.nabble.com/43-Vertical-and-the-K2-tuner-tp2481408p2486639.html
I remember one in particular, circa 1959. I had been licensed about a year and needed a tower. My then neighbor and Elmer the late Lee, W7UVR, had a 30' aluminum one laying in his yard and I asked him to "donate" it to me.
He said that if I helped him install the ground radials under his V80 he would give me the tower. I naively said yes.
It's necessary to set this up. Although the neighborhood was nice, one-acre lots then on the outskirts of Tucson, my family was working class and Lee was the recent beneficiary of a large trust fund. Why he remained in the neighborhood was a mystery to me, but nevertheless, he did. This is especially baffling considering that he had a noisy power line cutting across the cornet of his lot, so until Collins came out with their noise blanker for the 75A-4 sometime later, he couldn't hear anything. So he decide to go mobile. You can see THE mobile here:
http://www.k0bg.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=1079Clearly, Lee didn't do anything half-way. The same was true for the home station: A bank of built-in 6' relay racks populated with a common power supply and modulator and individual amplifiers for each band using push-pull 304TLs. Still, since he couldn't hear much, he got himself an appointment as an ARRL "Official Bulletin Station", retransmitting W1AW announcements. Thus the need for a multi-band omni-directional antenna to augment the Christmas tree Telrex stack.
When I entered this picture the vertical was standing and the transmission line was in place. I swear I'm not making this up, he was using rigid, air-insulated hardline filled with nitrogen.
Not content to have a sloppy installation he wanted four-foot ground rods at the end of each radial so that the wire could be pulled tight and anchored to them. This is where I came in, he needed some to pound ground rods. I don't remember exactly how many I drove but I did it for days. As I remember, before he became wealthy he had designed BC stations, I suspect it was the classic 120. When I got done, we stretched and soldered the wire and he called in a landscaper to cover it all up with topsoil.
I picked up my 30' tower and walked the two blocks home with it.
--- On Sun, 3/15/09, Ken Kopp <
[hidden email]> wrote:
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