Xynthia

Sunday’s storm Xynthia made me run upstairs and look out the window quite a few times. This was one bad storm! The tower and antennas were moving each time the wind picked up speed. These are the occasions I’m really glad I have a crank up tower. Everything nice at 8m above the ground, which is still high enough for 100km/hr wind speeds. Fortunately there was no damage. Only the WARC dipole got shifted about 30° so it wasn’t parallel to the yagi’s boom anymore. Not really a problem but it looks sloppy and I hate that. I want my station to look good.

This morning I tilted the tower over and adjusted the dipole’s position. I also had to do that two years ago after a storm. It was also time for a visual inspection of the yagi, the mast bearing and the tower’s hardware. Everything looked OK. I tried to climb the tower to fix the problem but the yagi sits in the way to move higher, and the mast up the tower is too long to reach the dipole when standing on the tower. Even if I could reach it, I don’t think it’s a good idea to stand on the boom of the OptiBeam yagi. So it’s a good thing I spent money on the tilt-over system. One day I need to replace the flimsy clamps on the Fritzel dipole. I made my own for the yagi using industrial grade polypropylene high pressure clamps. That assembly does NOT move and gives plenty of grip compared to simple muffler clamps.

By the way… Yesterday I was reading my contesting headlines and I almost fell off my chair. NS3T offers some very good contesting news and he posted an article on the DA0HQ-unique issue in the IARU HF Championship contest. Here’s the link to the article. I was surprised to see NS3T quote me and mentioning my name. I completely forgot but sure enough I did a posting on the topic about three years ago (link). Once again the proof that the Internet never forgets a thing…