[SixClub] Finally back on six...sort of.

[Roger (K8RI)]

After nearly 4 months I'm at least back on the air. The main antennas are
still not up and running, but from the house I do have the half wave slopers
on 75 and 40 with a half sloper on 160 running. I've repaired the rotator so
it's ready to go back in the tower. The 7L 6-meter C3i needs the boom truss
reattached and the whole works needs to be raised back up into position from
resting on top of the tower. Actually the whole works needs to be
repositioned with the 7L C3i at 12' above the tribander and the 144/440
array 10' above that. This requires making a new boom to mast clamp for the
6-meter yagi.   I hope to be able to get back to climbing before summer's
end. I'm still not to the point where I am willing to trust that left foot
on the tower although it has reached the point where I can do a set 10 reps
at 200# on the leg press, one leg at a time. Still,  that's not quite the
same as climbing a 100' tower let alone working up there for a couple of
hours.

Out in the shop I'm currently running a little Yaesu FT897D into a new Tokyo
HL-1.5KFX to a HyGain Patriot 40 through 6 neter vertical with the base at
32 feet. It  seems to work well on 40 and six while doing a good simulation
of a dummy load on 20 with high SWR on the other bands.  When I first put it
up the SWR was low on all bands so I have a feeling that big tower hasn't
caught all the lightning strikes.  On 40 it's only good for about the bottom
50 KHz so I can  at least get my CW practice.   Looks like all of my
antennas still need work.

At-any-rate, on six I never seemed to be able to make other than the
occasional contact (rare actually) with the 897D and the vertical, but the
HL-1.5K has changed that. Now, if I can hear them, I can work them (usually)
and the past three afternoons have provided quite a few contacts. I didn't
get to the shop until late yesterday and the band appeared to be going out
with only a few weak signals with lots of QSB. So I moved up the band and
called CQ.  I actually had a small pile-up going, and managed to work three
of them before the band folded. It did come back for a few minutes for
another couple of contacts about a half hour later.

I've been hearing all three coasts with the East coast being mainly New
England, but it did get as far South as Virginia.
I'm currently running the HL-1.5K without the auto-band change feature as
the Yaesu cable is for the "big" sets (FT1000 and such) with the 8 pin DIN
connector with the keying line seperate while the 897D uses a mini 8 pin DIN
with the keying line included. Actually the other sets have a keying line in
the 8 pin DIN connector as well, but the supplied cable doesn't use it. So
I'm currently trying to figure out the pin-out of the socket on the back of
the FL-1.5K so I can construct a cable. Unfortunately they didn't bother to
include pinouts in the manual for the rear connectors. They provide the
cables and expect you to use those.

It is good to be back on six,

73

Roger (K8RI - EN73)