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I finally made the decision to put up a tower. It's
has been since 1986 I have had a tower in the backyard and the choice was
made on a telescoping tilt-over by U.S. Tower model MA-40. I no longer at
this age have any desire to climb a tower. This is the reason for the tilt
over. I just crank it down across the backyard and then I can make adjustments
to the antennas or rotator.
Due to Hurricane Katrina and Rita, I had to wait
about 3 months after I paid for the tower to have the tower delivered. Which was alright because we had
to get engineering, building permits, dig the hole, set the steel, pour the
concrete then allow the concrete to set and cure for 28 days. U.S. Tower did
send me the anchor bolts ahead of time along with a template so when the
tower did arrive all I had to do was bolt it down and crank it up.
The Engineer required us to drill a pier 12" diameter x 10' deep. The
city didn't accept U.S. Tower's engineered plans for 2 reasons. First the
Engineer was licensed in California not Texas and second, the seal on those
plans had an expired date on the engineer's seal. No problem. $200.00 paid
for a local engineer to come up with the footing plans with a good Texas
Professional Engineer's Seal that the city would accept. On our way to
the 10' depth we hit
rock at 6'-6" and continued for another foot to 7'-6". The
Engineer accepted that as good enough. Thank goodness for my
sons who were a great help in the heavy work. The box is 36"x36"x30" then the pier continues to 7'-6" below
the surface and 12" of that is into limestone rock. Renting the Bobcat was a little expensive but we believe we're
not going to have a tower leaning after a few years. All this expense and
work so I can talk to people I don't know, my wife asked.
The tower is 40' high at it's full extension. The beam is
a Force-12 C3SS fed with about 80 feet of LMR-400 coax. Right below the
rotator I have a 7-30 MHz G5RV off center feed dipole. Now to figure some
way to get 80 meters in on this antenna farm.
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| Eldest son Dustin operating the Bobcat. |
Have we struck oil yet? We hit
ROCK! |
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My sons mixing and
pouring the concrete. It's nice to have cheap labor. |
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27-80 pound sacks of
concrete and a nice smooth finish. Concrete was Maximizer
Concrete from the Home Depot, 5,000 p.s.i. and each sack yield one cubic foot of
concrete. I also rented the mixer from H.D. |
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The Force-12 C3SS out
of the box.
Each element was bundled together. |
Very easy to assemble
and get on the air. I received excellent reports from LY80R and
SV9CVY right off the bat. |
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The 20 meter
reflector was the largest and
most difficult element to
assemble, but still went together easily. |
Here's
the most precarious part of this MA-40 tilt over tower. That's a
3/4" steel bolt holding the weight of the whole tower, rotator
and antenna. I would have liked to have seen a larger bolt along
with a bushing through the lower section. Sort of like one of
those 1" steel bolts embedded in the concrete base. I'm going to
get me some aluminum Rustolium paint for those steel bolts. |
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