[OKDXA] Lift Truck - 160 Meters

[N5PA]

Jim:

Do you know where I can get one that goes up 90 feet?  I have not been able
to find one around here and several people need to use one to straighten
their antennas out after the hurricane.  The only thing we have found is a
crane with a hook and that is not what we need.

I would be interested in how you loaded up your tower on 160 meters.  When I
build my new house I am planning on loading up one of my towers on 160.  One
of the guys around here said that an 82 foot tower with beams on top would
be too short to load up.  He uses a couple of Vacuum Variable Capacitors to
load up his tower.  He also said that you need to have insulators in the guy
wires about every 29 feet so they will not interfere with it.  I thing he
said he had 64 radials buried in the yard and a lot of them go out into the
lake.  That is the problem with 160, all the radials.  An Inverted-L or a
Double-L would work just about as well without the radials.  There are a few
folks down here running the Double-L with good success.  My Inverted-V at 80
feet just does not work well for DX and it picks up a lot of noise.  I am
thinking about putting up one of the K9AY pendants for receiving at the new
place because I will not have room for a beverage.  

I have not worked VU7RG.  The pileups at night and on the weekends have been
crazy to say the least and I have been out of town a good bit.  I got back
from Waco yesterday and I will be making a lot of trips out there as we are
opening a new hatchery and processing plant out there.  I was at Baylor
yesterday morning meeting with some of the people in IT and looking at their
wiring infrastructure.  I saw a lot of ham tags in the faculty parking
garage.  We had some sleet there yesterday morning.  I just cannot stay up
late and work the next day to be able to work some of the good DX on 160
meters.  I am going to work the CQ 160 Meter CW Contest Friday night.  Maybe
I will catch some of you Okies on there.  I worked a lot of the guys in
OKDXA this past weekend in the NAQP.  There are a lot of Okies that work
SSB.  Listening to the reflector I thought it would have been a lost cause,
HiHi.  To me, I work them all, but I do prefer CW.

73,
Alan, N5PA