Pictures of the tribander in place

Pictures of the proud dad, mentor, elmer, senior member of the build team, and friend. (W3MGL). As you can see, he looks excited to be there!!!! Just ask him! He has been there through building the antenna to its going up.

Well, here it is!!! The first pictures of the tribander in place. As you can see, it is not as beautiful as a tower, but it is doing the trick. I went ahead and soldered a connector on the coax and put the antenna to the test on 20 meters for the Worked All Europe contest for a few minutes. Of course, the rotor is not connected, so I was shooting over the Pole and got some good contacts. I did my test and put it to bed until today. After getting home from church, I was able to work another 20 to give me grand total of 26 contacts. I was switching back and forth between the beam and the G5RV just to see how it was working. I actually got a better signal on the beam pointed north for Iceland than I did from the G5RV pointing generally east and west.

Today, after church, my sons and I moved the south end of the G5RV over a few feet to move it farther away from the tribander in case of wind blowing the two of them towards each other. John was the spotter and Justin was the safety guy. I had to shoot the antenna twice because the first shot actually flew over the tribander......NOT GOOD. But, the second shot was perfect and actually the whole antenna now is a couple of feet higher than it was previously.

Tomorrow, I will be rotating the tribander for the first time. It will be interesting to see what happens when it moves for the first time. Let's just hope that aluminum stays in the air!!!