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This antenna works great! In my earlier post I mentioned that SWR was high on 30m, but last night I let the automatic tuner on the TS-440S match it — and ES3AX gave me a 579 from Estonia! 4Z5MU (Israel) went into the logbook last night, too, but that was on 20m.

A couple weeks ago I published my son’s take on Antenna-Days #1 and #2. Here is his take on the rest of the project:

Helping Dad Build His Antenna, Days 3-5
by Antonio Mitchell, October 20, 2011

Building the antenna has taken a bit. It has been fun for the most part. We finally have it almost finished. The past couple days have been really busy. I hope that I can remember them so that I may provide my readers with an understanding of what we did.

It was pretty chilly on Monday. The wind was blowing pretty hard so we did not get to go on the roof. We spent the day getting the antenna wire cut and put onto the balun. Once we were done with putting the antenna wire on the balun my dad had to put it on to the pulley attached to the aluminum pole. My dad and I put the pole against the house and took the two ends of the antenna wire and tied ropes to them. After that we took the ropes and tied them to some trees. It was so windy that it was hard to hold the pole. While I was holding the pole my dad took the SWR meter and tried to figure out if he needed to add or take away some wire from the connectors on the balun. It did not work so well. [Being so close to the ground, SWR was sky-high on 40m.] We took the pole and the ropes down and called it a day.

On Tuesday we first shot a weight over the house so that we could get a safety line over the house. The safety line was for when Dad went on the roof. It took us quite a few tries to get it over the house. Once the line was over we attempted to put a line over the tree which is where one end of the antenna wire is going to sit. Using my slingshot did not work. My dad went up to Runnings to get ground wire and PVC pipe to build a potato launcher. It took him a little while to find all of it. When he came home we assembled the potato launcher. After supper we tried to get a line over the tree, but it was dark and windy. We did launch a potato with a screw in it. It did not go over the tree because of the wind. It went over a couple trees. We could not find the potato.

Wednesday we did manage to find the potato. We had to cut some of the line we used. My dad decided he would get the line into the tree when he was on the roof. A friend of my dad came over and helped put the aluminum pole with the antenna attached and the other pole into the tripods. The antenna is finally up! My dad just has a few final touches to do and then it will be up there for good I hope. Last night my dad was able to talk to some people on the air using the antenna that is now on the roof.

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