New Topband Vertical

A little late into the Topband season the new inverted L has been installed at SEØX, just in time for the CQWW SSB contest. The vertical part of the inverted L stands 19 meter tall. The bottom 13 meters are made of 50, 45 and 40 mm aluminium pipe and the top part is four

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SteppIR homebrew 6m element

The SteppIR 3-element yagi at SEØX has never worked well on 6 meters because of high SWR, more than 2:1 over the whole band. Someone suggested that adding the parasitic element might solve the problem. I had to bring the antenna down for replacement of the dipole EHU recently which provided a good opportunity to

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SteppIR failure (again!)

For the second time the 3-element SteppIR antenna at SEØX failed, and this time with terrible timing a few days before the SAC SSB Contest. First I expected the failure to be similar to when then antenna copper tape jammed inside the EUH the past winter. Friday night, less than 20 hours before the start of the contest, we took the tower down and opened up the dipole EHU to find the drive shaft broken.

SEØX SteppIR back in the air

Finally the SEØX 3 element SteppIR is back in service after repair following the failure this winter. This picture was taken after the first test QSO receiving excellent reports from Kevin, NL7Z. In February SEØX lost it’s 3-element SteppIR antenna. During rapid temperature change from above to below zero the antenna tape froze inside the fibreglass pole tube and got

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