[ADXA] wind

[Dennis Schaefer]

No one said anything, but it was a little insensitive of me to post that
picture of our K5BAT tower in relation to wind survival.  Antenna problems
are indeed discouraging and hard to deal with.  While it’s true that
nothing would bring down the tower, we have had some adventures with
antennas.  Shortly after getting the tower, we put up a Force-12 C3, which
is a pretty robust antenna.  It is also flexible.  Buzzards would sometimes
perch on an element and bend it down, but then they would get tired of the
motion and move on.

One time we arrived and found the front 10M director speared into the
ground.  We analyzed the situation and decided it worked well enough
everywhere except above 29 mhz so we left it off but did go up and tighten
up what remained.    Then the coax and balun were torn off and in the
process of fixing it, noticed that the tip of the 20M driven element was
gone.  That required another trip up to fix it, and it started sleeting
while Craig was up there.

We found out that you shouldn’t use 9913 unless you did a world-class
waterproofing job, or lived in the desert.

We had a beautiful 40M rotatable dipole that suddenly started resonating on
about 10 Mhz.  It is still on the ground, probably with a blown coil.

We found out that CAT 5 cable works just fine for a remote antenna switch
until the birds eat it, and that rotators don’t survive well under those
conditions either.

These are just a few of the things the weather has done.  Everyone in this
group is tough - you’re DX’ers and you have to be, but we all feel your
pain when hardware breaks.  Nature is not going to let you rest, but
sometimes you’d like to yell and ask for a little break!

73,
Dennis/RZ
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