Tower & Antenna Project
April & May, 2019
I was a (mostly) active amateur "ham" radio operator from the summer
of 1960 through January, 1997. With great reluctance I decided to go
inactive with the hobby because of major hearing losses. Although I could
still hear, my hearing was impaired to the point that copying weak signals using
Morse code was marginal and because I was unable to fully understand
the dialog in voice communications, regardless of signal strength.
Let's jump forward to September, 2018, nearly 22 years later - my hearing is worse! I decided to take a road trip from our Tucson home to the eastern USA to do some sightseeing and to visit old friends in Virginia and South Carolina. One of the friends I visited was Larry Vogt, N4VA, in Springfield, VA. Larry and his husband Coleman treating me to great company and a magnificent dinner, then he gave me a demo of the new FT8 communications mode. FT8 required an interface to a computer, which of course as a retired computer programmer anything which combined ham radio and computers appealed to me. But I told Larry that I would be unable to operate using FT8 because of my hearing problem. Larry reached out and turned the volume all the way down, then continued making contacts. Wham! It's like I was struck with lightning . . . I decided that as soon as I returned to Tucson I would start acquiring gear and reactivate my radio license, then work 99.99% FT8 (and later FT4).
AA4M became operational again on November 28, 2018 using an Icom IC-7300 transceiver and a dipole (wire, non-directional) antenna. I made over 3,000 contacts over the next 5 months, but I could see that there were countries I'd never reach unless I put a directional antenna W-A-Y up in the air. So early in 2019 I began learning all I could about contemporary beam antennas and towers. Since I was now 74 years old, I decided to hire a specialist to do the installation, a decision I'm glad I made! Ultimately I decided to buy a Mosley TA-54-XLT-6 antenna and a 2-year old US Towers TX-455 (55 foot) tower. The installation would be done by Mike Addis of Addisigns, Inc. and I would be assembling the antenna myself. Although Mike and his company are signage design and installation experts, they do a respectable amount of tower and antenna work. Mike did a superb job and I can highly recommend him and his company for similar jobs. Thanks to Dennis, N6ITY for recommending Addisigns!
Most US hams probably realize that communications from the western USA to Europe can be very difficult at times. Because of this, with the dipole antenna and 100 watts I managed to contact an average of 1 European a week. Once the new beam antenna was operational, while still running 100 watts, I contacted 9 Europeans during my first 45 minutes on the air . . . great fun! :-)
The below 39 pictures represent the best of the 89 photographs I had taken . . . Enjoy!
(Click on picture to enlarge)
You may use any of the above pictures for any purpose and may do so without giving me credit. Note that these pictures have been downsized for those with slow connection speeds. If you'd like copies of the original JPG pictures, send me an E-mail telling me which pictures you want and I'll be happy to send the original pictures to you at no charge!