Hexbeam up!

Beautiful weather here today, and a free afternoon gave me the chance to get the Hexbeam up. Luckily there was enough room to assemble the beam near the mast. First job was to fit the fibreglass spreaders which I’d already assembled a while ago.

Once that was done I attached the 1:1 balun, the guy lines from the spreaders to the centre, and the guy lines between spreaders. Next the 6 wire elements for 6, 10, 12, 15 ,17 and 20 meters. This is one of the most time consuming parts and easy to get the wires knotted up when you unravel them.

Once everything was ready I roped my brother into action once again. I lowered the tower and we lifted the Hex into position. This was no fun at all! and really a three man job. It was heavier than I expected and extremely hard to manoever into place. I had kittens as it got caught up on everything in sight and just the amount of effort to pop it onto the rotator was huge, followed by relief when it slid into the stub mast. After the fixing bolts were put into place to hold the aerial onto the stub mast it was raised into it’s final position.

The Hexbeam only just clears a branch of the tree, I’ll have to find a way to prune a bit off. In the meantime I will have to watch the SWR and also be careful next windy day.

Tomorrow I’ll connect up the PL259 on the radio end and fire it up in anger. One small cock-up, it’s pointing North instead of South, so will have to drop the mast tomorrow and swivel the stub mast 180 degrees. The aerial looks huge on the ground, but up at its full height looks fine.