So Easy a 3 Year Old Can Do It

Within 2 hours, K5GO and I had eleven 10 meter elements made.  Actually K5GO did most of the work, I showed up for about 45 minutes to help with some pop riveting.  The reflector is good for over 130 mph, according to Yagi Stress, and the subsequent elements will survive even more wind speed.  The weight of each element is 3 pounds.  The construction of the elements is as follows:

OD                  WALL                           HALF ELEMENT EXPOSED LENGTH
.375"                .058                                                     38"
.500"                .116                                                     14"
.625"                .174                                                     36"

The elements are made up of .625", .5", and .375" tubing.  Utilizing 12' lengths of .5" tubing made element construction very simple.  Our plan is to build a single 11 element 10 meter yagi, and test its effectiveness at 60'.  At some point, we made add a second antenna underneath it.

Here are a couple of pictures of the elements, including my 3 year old son holding one of the elements.  The elements will look a lot better when they are in the air! 

New 15 Meter Yagi

K5GO and I spent a few hours working on the new 15 meter Yagi.  It will be 10 elements on a 107' boom at 60' fixed on Europe.  We have 9 of 10 elements on the booms and the next task will be getting the RF choke and feedline mounted on the boom, then we'll test it before it goes up.  The antenna has over 14 dBi of gain across the entire 15 meter band with an SWR of less than 1.2: 1 across the entire band with over 30 dB of front to back.  It should be a really good antenna!


We're hoping to get it up before the WPX CW contest.  I'm planning on working the contest SOAB HP.  It's been a while since I've done a single op contest and I'm looking forward to a tune up before WRTC.

Welcome

I've been inspired by the blogs of K4ZA and K1TTT to document the events at the K5GO multi-multi contest station.  In addition to projects, pictures, videos and stories from our station, I will occasionally include information about our new business venture: Cycle-24.

Please visit us at:

www.k5go.com
www.cycle-24.com