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.  <div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">We found out that you shouldn’t use 9913 unless you did a world-class waterproofing job, or lived in the desert.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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!</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">73,</div><div dir="auto">Dennis/RZ</div><div dir="auto"><br></div>