Antenna Takedown – Part 3
March 13, 2025
A nice weather day. I started working on liberating cables from the shack and rolling them up. Then the call to play golf kicked in so not much progress.
March 14, 2025
Another very nice day. I continued working on rolling up cables.
The weather was so nice – sunny, warm, no wind – I just kept thinking I was missing out on getting some tower work done. Martin AA1ON called about then and I asked if he could come over. He brought his son Owen and we were able to work on removing some tower sections.
Nothing quite like being 100′ up, with the top set of guy wires loosened, and feeling the tower sway a bit. Luckily there was just a tiny gentle breeze at the top of the tower. It truly was a perfect day for this part of the project.
We were able to get the tower down to the 40′ level. Need to put on some temporary guys to go any lower so it seemed like a good place to stop.
March 15, 2025
This was the next scheduled big work day. The goal was to get the 40-2CD and 205CA off of Tower 1. It was a nice, New England “Spring’ day with temperatures in the 40s, forecasted to go to 60. There was very little wind. Perfect!
The crew arrived at 9 am. We had Mark KW1X, Martin AA1ON, John N1PGA, Ken WO1N, and Joe KM1P.
Since we had extra manpower and I needed time to get up the tower, Martin and Joe took on the job of rigging temporary guys on tower 2. That will save some time when we get ready to finish it.
As I worked my way up the tower, the first project was to remove the 20m stacking switch and its phasing lines. Then remove a metal box that was the container for the previous 20m stacking relays and some other splice points. The stacking switch was easy. The metal box not so much. The screws that hold the cover closed were completely rusted. It took all my effort with the channel locks to move them.
I was so intent on getting the job done that I forgot to take a picture of the inside!
The 5-element 20 was at the top of the tower. It had a boom truss that was held up by a very rusty u-bolt about 4′ up the mast. I was lucky that the u-bolt was not so far gone that I could turn the nuts and loosen it. I cut the coaxes leading to the 20 and the 40 meter antennas. I hate to do that, but it was old enough that it would not be a candidate to reuse. I also removed the first director that was closest to the tower. This converted the antenna into a 4-element created a lot more room for rotating around the tower on the way down. I rigged a couple of straps and were ready to go.
Once the antenna was loose from the mast, it was a matter of getting it down through the guy wires. With the element removed, there wasn’t a lot I could use to rotate the antenna. It took a few tries and some back-up and do-overs, but we made it. Only one bent tip end of an element!
I immediately headed back up the tower to remove the rotator. The rotator was the same model as on Tower 2, but this one was 20 years older. The hardware was metric so I didn’t have the right wrench or socket size. The 1/2″ just barely fit so I used that. The hardware was rusty, which didn’t help. And it looks like one of the mast clamps was cracked…
While it was headed down in the bucket, I started removing the rotator plate. Didn’t want it to hang things up when we lowered the mast. Of course, this meant undoing 6 U-bolts. And yes, there is always one that doesn’t want to give up easily. I had a second rotator plate already inside the tower that was keeping the mast straight.
We lowered the mast 4′ at a time. This mast is 20′ long, 2″ OD. and 1/4″ wall. It weighs more than 100 lbs! I rigged a couple of safety U-bolts to catch it if we lost control.
Things went well and soon we had the 40m beam sitting just a few inches above the top of the tower.
One of the lessons for the day was the value of stainless steel for nuts and bolts. See how shiny the stainless is compared to 30-year-old steel? This made taking the beam off the mast an easy job. I only dropped one saddle in the process. Whoops.
This antenna was fairly well-balanced and easy to corkscrew down the tower. The biggest challenge was not having anything to grab when I wanted to tip an element down to escape a guy wire. Unfortunately, there were no pictures during this process as we had all hands on the rope.
When an antenna would get to the ground, the crew started disassembling it. Once again, we saw the value of stainless vs other metals when it came time to take things apart! Their efforts will save me a lot of time later.
It took about 4 hours to get the two antennas down. Time for a short break. N1PGA took this photo of me while I was getting psyched up to climb the tower again.
Back to the top of the tower, I went. I was cutting tape and tie wraps on the way to free the coax and control cables on the tower. I had missed a few tie wraps, so we couldn’t get everything removed until I was on the way down at the end.
The mast was waiting for me. We had to lower the mast another 4 feet so I could reach the top. I dropped a rope down the inside, climbed down, and made a knot, then back up to loosen the U-bolts that were holding the mast in place. A half-turn of a nut and the mast started to slide. It went down the inside of the tower to the bottom without catching on anything. The guys had a challenge trying to lift the mast inside the tower so they could remove the knot!
I was very happy to see this part of the project reach a successful conclusion.
I wanted to remove the top plate to get some idea of how much this tower was going to resist coming apart.
Next lesson: Always use Rohn galvanized hardware on your towers. I must have run out of hardware and used whatever I had in hand at the time. The small bolts were very rusted and it was difficult to remove the nuts. Two of the large-size bolts were frozen and resisted all efforts to turn the nuts. After wasting a bunch of time, we decided to take down the top section with the plate attached.
This meant we needed to remove the guy wires at the 95′ level. I climbed down to the guy bracket at 65′ while the guys loosened and then unhooked the top set of guys. Nothing like that feeling of climbing up a tower that feels wobbly. You have to keep telling yourself it is not going to fall over…
I removed the guy wires from the bracket and tossed them down. The bolts on this first section were easily removed and it was a great relief to see the legs moving inside the section. It took a little help from the tower jack to get it started, but the first section popped off and was on its way down. We took down two more sections to get to the next guy bracket and called it quits for the day. At one point, I looked down and saw the full ground crew all in a line on the rope.
Total work time was from a little after 9 am to 3:35 pm. A very successful day and all goals were exceeded.
We headed to the drive-in for some R&R time.
Here is what the neighbors across have seen for the past 30+ years. And what they see now.
