I would never use steel wool except as a last resort - it deposits steel shavings all over everything and you can never really clean it all off. These shavings will rust and perhaps cause dissimilar
30+ What, no Hygain antennas/rotators, Ameritron amplifiers, etc.? ;-) I too had good luck with MFJ and I used the phone. I ordered replacement Hygain beta match parts (rods and clamps) and they came
I wasn't worried about cosmetics - simply the functional aspect. To each his own. Also, using Scotch-brite requires no washing of the elements - hard to do outside in the winter. Again, one would onl
Indeed. It seems this bolt weakness with the HamIV was so infamous that Hygain "improved" it with SIGNIFICANTLY stronger bolts in the T2X. The T2X has 1/4"-20 bolts, the Ham-IV something like #8 or s
Lowe's (not Home Depot) sells some suitable pulleys in their rope section. I have two of the larger ones that I've used with 7/16" and 1/2" rope as a snatch block and/or block-and-tackle. Around $40
Just to be clear - my use of "home center" pulleys is for the raising and lowering of tower stuff (e.g. snatch and block-and-tackles) - NOT for permanent usage. No doubt these "Chinese specials" woul
The best way to search the archives is to go to the list home site: http://www.contesting.com and look in the left menu area for "List Search" and enter the criteria (e.g., "Rohn 25 Bracketing" witho
The return loss improvement caused by cable attenuation will be twice the one-way cable loss, in this example: 4.9dB. That's enough to make an "infinite" SWR (at the load/antenna) look like 3.5:1 (in
Not sure where you'd find it on the web, but my (old) ITT Reference Data Book says that for hard-drawn copper wire, tensile strength is roughly 65,000lb/sq-in for wire sizes 8AWG-18AWG (lower for big
You need to do the deletion yourself. At the bottom of every email you get from Towertalk is a link http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk to the listinfo page. Click it and look at t
While putting up my Rohn 45 tower today, we discovered two JBKs (tower section bolt kits) that had missing hardware as delivered. These were, in theory, factory-sealed. Double check your hardware! It
I have two of these beasts http://www.m2inc.com/products/hf/40m/40m3lmono.html that I will be installing this fall (well, at least I'll get to one of them). They are used but seemingly in excellent s
You'll find in this case that since your antenna height is close to, but under a top guy, and the turning radius is rather large, that the guy anchors must be very far away (relative to "standard des
I disagree. If you push the guy out from the tower by one foot at the spot where the boom would otherwise hit it, you've added one foot to the clearance. To push it 1 foot away at the example's 60-fo
Oops, somehow the word "Boom" got into this thread... "Boom" is the wrong term - changing the boom length is not the same as changing the turning radius (in most cases!) In my original post (bottom)
Yes, of course... you and KK9A are both right. D'oh! Element sag will help the situation, guy sag will hurt it. What's the formula for calculating guy sag? Mike N2MG
No one gets "kicked off". Probably just a general Internet hiccup or perhaps someone behind the scenes at eHam tweaking something. Just wait a few minutes and try again. Mike N2MG webmaster@eham.net