Hi,
A few weeks ago I sent a message to the reflector concerning some
of my tower guy anchors being found to be on someone else's property.
(They put up a corral for the show horses they board, and two of the
anchors were inside it!)
I would like to thank everyone for their suggestions. Some
mentioned that I could just leave the anchors there since the property
owners told me not to worry, but I have seen them change their mind about
other things they had said. Others said the offer to rent the anchor
land or get an appeasement. One real good idea was to build a small
fence around the anchors to protect the horses. Some mentioned using
elevated guys - an idea which seemed pretty good but an awful lot of
extra work due to my soil composition.
I also received various comments about how close to the towers I
can go with my guys. (The guy anchors affected are on the NE side of my
towers, the direction from which sustained high winds are most often
expected in New England!) In the end, I chose to put in new anchors (on my
property this time!), and lower the towers. A careful check of the anchor
spacing revealed that both of my towers already was using 53% spacing on
those sides (because of my perceived property boundaries), so I decided to
stick with that percentage spacing. In this way I can lower one of them
only 20 feet and the other 15 feet. This is not nearly enough spacing
according to any specs I've found in antenna books, but we did have
sustained 100 mph winds from a Northeaster in December 1991 and one of
these towers had been installed at that time. The new ones will be shorter
and presumably will feel the effects of the wind a little less, so I have
no reason to believe that they will fail.
I have now finished one tower, and hope to have the other one done
by IARU. I will tell you this - this kind of work is not meant to be done
alone by one 46 year old person, but with God's grace I was able to get it
all taken care of with only a couple minor element bends and a host of
aches and pains (but no injuries). Now for the big tower!
By the way, last fall I bought a LOOS guy tension guage from Tower
Tech. (In previous years I guessed at the guy tension by eyesight.) What
a great tool! It is incredibly easy to use, and it really takes the
guesswork out of the guy wire adjustment. I also bought a TowerJack and
first used it on this Rohn 25 tower. It worked quite well, but I'm not yet
sure how it will perform on the Rohn 45 clone tower, which as I remember,
went together pretty tightly.
Also, I had received from HyGain the specs on converting my 105BA
and 155BA to 105CA and 155CA. After studying all the material, I decided
to leave the 155BA alone (since some of it's bandwide excellent SWR would
be sacrificed), but I did change the 10 meter yagi because it still covered
the whole band. Both antennas are back up, spaced 6 feet apart, and work
fine.
Thanks for all your suggestions and comments.
73, Dave Clemons K1VUT
p.s. - Can you believe it? I forgot to clean and polish the elements of
the 10 and 15 meter yagis while I had them down?
--
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