Ants are IMPOSSIBLE little creatures.

A couple years ago I was having problems with my weather station which was mounted 25' up my tower. It would just go offline. I would climb up to it, turn it off and back on and all was good again (for a while). It was up there for 15 years or so and these failures started a few years ago. I figured just old age and weather were the problem.

After more and more frequent outages I took it down, brought it into the house and opened it up. There must have been 5,000 ants, several nesting sites and hundreds of little white eggs inside. It looked like one of those "B" horror movies, they went EVERYWHERE. I quickly closed it and moved outside to the driveway.

I unplugged all the boards and removed them. I then sprayed an ant killer in the watertight enclosure and in the house where I opened it, and let it do its work. Then I took my hose and rinsed out all the bodies left inside. The circuit boards were placed in alcohol to kill those that were under the chips and rinsed with water and left to evaporate. They entered through the weep hole in the bottom of the electronics box. How they found it in the first place and then were able to follow their "cookie crumbs" back up to it after the scouts went down the tower to inform the rest.

After cleaning and drying everything, I put it back together and mounted it much lower on my chain link fence. I also put several layers of very fine mesh in the weep hole to discourage their return. Never did put it back up on the tower. But I did purchase a much newer weather station and mounted it about 15' up on the tower. A much easier climb and so for no problems with it.

73's

George - WB5JJJ
HoIP - 100105

HH - 4969

On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 8:47 AM EJ Jones <k5ej@outlook.com> wrote:

Ants!! They are destructive little creatures. I have had more problems with him getting into relay boxes and such. Hope your hand heals up fast!

EJ

Sent from Mail for Windows

From: w5zn@w5zn.org
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2022 7:11 AM
To: adxa@mailman.qth.net
Subject: [ADXA] The Dangers of DX'ing

Since I was gone most of the summer I wasn't able to spend my usual time keeping things clean out in the field around the radial plates on my 160 and 80 meter TX arrays. That was my project late yesterday afternoon. Underneath and around one side of the plate on the SE parasitic element of the 160 array was a big clump of dirt that had built up. So I just started dragging it out with my left hand to learn it was a big fire ant mound. It wasn't a normal ant hill, just dirt built up so I had no concern about it. Of course, if you've ever had any experience with fire ants you know they are faster and more vicious than a water moccasin when you're draining the pond. So my left hand was covered with those little bastards before I knew it and couldn't get them off fast enough before I had a number of stings. As a result I wound up with a swollen hand last night and still this morning.

So be VERY CAREFUL and observant during antenna work, even if you're on the ground!

Oh....what happened to the ants?? I keep a nice supply of BIFEN mixed in a one gallon spray rig. The ants are all SK now and the radial plate area is clean!!!!!

73 Joel W5ZN

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