On The Tower

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Holding all of this hardware in the breeze is a 100 foot, commercial grade, free-standing tower loaded with VHF, UHF, & Microwave antennas.

My antennas consist of a 7 element KLM Yagi for 6 Meters, a 20 element KLM long boom Yagi for 2 Meters. I have a 12 element Yagi for 222 MHz all fed with 7/8" heliax, a stacked set of four 25 element Yagi's for 432 MHz fed with LMR-1200, a pair of 47 element Loop Yagi's for 903 MHz, and a pair of 55 element Loop Yagis for 1.2 GHz, both fed with 1-5/8" heliax. These are all made by Directive Systems. To top all these antennas off, I have a Diamond X-500 NHA vertical for 2 Meter & 440 MHz FM work. This is all on top of the 100 foot tower and is rotated by a Yaesu G-2800SDX rotor. On a custom side mount, I have installed a 2 foot commercial microwave dish with a Down East Microwave dual band feed for 5 & 10 GHz. Just above the dish is a stacked array of four 52 element Loop Yagi's for 2.4 GHz, and another stacked array of four 76 element Loop Yagi's for 3.4 GHz. These antennas are also from Directive Systems. Check out the
Installation of the Microwave Array.

Here are some pictures of my Amateur Radio tower. It is a 100 foot tall, free standing tower structure. It is a commercial grade, RTP Series, manufactured by Rohn.

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Here I am standing on the reinforcement bars that are buried in my tower foundation. There are 60 pieces, 14 foot long, of 7/8" diameter reinforcing bars. There are two mats assembled on 1 foot squares. This is to make the concrete strong enough to prevent cracking from the heavy loads imposed by the tower. The concrete base is 15 feet by 15 feet, and 4 feet deep. It took 32 cubic yards of concrete to fill up!

Here I am assembling the tower sections. This is the bottom section, which is 8-1/2 feet across at the tower legs. Here I have just finished tightening the bolts on the first 20 foot section. At this point, it's obvious this is going to be a BIG tower.

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Once the first section is assembled, a gin pole is installed to hoist up the heavy, and very large, tower legs. Once the tower legs are in place, the diagonal braces can be hoisted with the gin pole and bolted into place. The gin pole is home-brewed out of a length of pipe with a pulley welded to one end, and a rope runs through the pipe to a hand-crank boat winch mounted at the base of the tower. A helper at the base ties the pieces to the rope and winches them to me at the top. The heavy pieces made for some really tired arms from all of the cranking.

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After much hoisting and bolting, you end up with something that looks like this. Here I am installing the 432 MHz &903 MHz antennas. The long rope running down the left side of the tower is connected to the hand-crank winch. A helper on the ground would do the winching while I was free to guide the hardware being hoisted, and bolt it into position.

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This is an interesting time-lapse photo of my tower taken at night. It was an approximately 60 second exposure. The tower is very dimly lit from the lights in a distant parking lot.

This what the tower looks like along side my house. The tower is mounted close to the house to keep the feedline runs as short as is possible. Believe it or not, the town building inspector had no problem with me building this tower even though it is located only 27 feet from the street!

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This is what the New England Autumn foliage looks like from the 110 foot level on the tower. Notice the end of one of the 432 MHz Yagi's. I could have sat up there all day looking around on this day. The view from the top is awesome!