It’s been a very busy couple of weeks at the QTH of Ron GW6ZDH over in Conwy. Ron tasked himself firstly with the assembly of the new 7 ele HF beam, and secondly repairing one of the club’s 2m 17ele Tonnas.

Putting the HF beam together was not an easy task, especially when you consider that the parts count is over 600 and a few bits were broken and a few more missing. Not to be put off, Ron downloaded schematics and a parts list from the internet (probably on his ZX81 hi hi), he loosely put the monster together on his lawn / patio and worked out what went where!

The beam has a boom length of 24′ and the longest element is 36′, but Ron did a great job, making the missing parts himself. When a few of us called to see the finished article, Ron had it mounted on his whirlygig pole!

Click on the images below to enlarge them.

Moving on to the Tonnas, one was complete but the brackets joining the boom sections together were missing on the other. Back to the shack / engineering shop and Ron quickly fabricated replacements.

As you can see in the photos below, both the aerials are now assembled and mounted ready for the mast. Ron connected up the phasing harness and he reports low SWR, they should produce excellent results @ 650′ ASL on top of the mast at around 70′ AGL.

This coming Sunday has been suggested to get the aerials up in the air, this will be confirmed on Thursday evening.