Greetings, TowerTalkians --
And hello from Dayton. Boy, there's always a lot happening here. I spent
yesterday in the commercial booth areas and am heading out to the 2-1/2 acres
of flea market today.
There isn't a lot of new stuff of interest to TowerTalkians that I've
seen - mostly the same old same old.
The new Bencher Skyhawk hardware was on display and it looks pretty good.
They are using a really nice extrusion for the element to boom clamps as well
as rivets to hold the elements together. They have a new boom-to-mast clamp
that doesn't use any U-bolts so that's real progress and all in all, it looks
pretty good. I was assured that delivery will start next week so if you've
been waiting for one, it should be available real soon if not immediately. The
Bencher Skyhawk was a good perfomer in our tribander comparison results.
I presented the tribander comparison info on Friday at K3LR's Antenna
Forum to an SRO audience. It seemed to be well received and of course some
people had nits to pick about one thing or another. My comment to them for
them to conduct some testing and present THEIR results. We're actually hoping
that some people will pick up the challenge. There were quite a few
TowerTalkians present and I was happy to meet as many as I could. Thanks to
everyone that introduced themselves and to those who had some positive comment
about our reflector. And 'true north' only was mentioned once!
I had a chance to look at the new Cushcraft hardware and it's definitely
an improvement. They're using extrusions for the element-to-boom clamps also.
Glen Martin Engineering has a new steel guyed tower with a heavy duty
Hazer system. This puppy'll take big loads and will go to 200 feet. It uses an
aluminum channel track system on the tower face but you still have to detach
the guys to operate the apparatus. The tower itself is very similar to AB105
but I haven't seen any specs on it. It looks very brute.
Bill Hider, N3RR, was manning the TIC booth and there is continuing
interest in them.
It's been in the 80's and low 90's so several sunburns from the flea
market crowd.
Check out the Sultans of Schwing http://www.qth.com/sos/dayton98.html for
real live hospitality suite action.
Cheers, Steve K7LXC
--
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