I wish to thank the officer’s and crew of the BLHA for their hospitality and for allowing me to
be a part of their group; I look forward to doing it again sometime soon. If you would like more
information o
n the BLHA, please check out their website at
http://www.ss310.com/
Club and Museum Want List
Currently we are looking for florescent lamps and starters for the on board lighting on the
Batfish. We need
F8T5 Lamps and FS
-
5 Starters. The Bulbs are 12 inc
hes long, and are 8
-
watts
bulbs. All together, the boat has 72 of these with very few actually working. We probably need
several Ballast transformers, but I am uncertain of the model and type.
The boat also has 12 lamps that are 20
-
watt lamps and 24 inch
long and we need a few of those.
Project Completion report
Cushcraft A4S Beam Antenna Rebuild Project
April 16, 2011
After having problems with the feed line, and getting the connectors all repaired, we continued to
have problems with the Cushcraft A4S
Beam antenna, particularly with the 20 Meter band. The
10 and 15 meter bands seemed to be ok as far as SWR went, but 20M was nearly 3:1 at the band
edges and about 2.1:1 at resonance. We were just tuning the antenna with the tuner, but then the
received st
ations were normally at some odd angel to the direction the antenna was
pointed……… Way off at times.
I know it is normal to get stations off the sides, but when we would turn the antenna to point to
the station, it would then be null
-
ed out. Clearly, so
mething was wrong.
Saturday April 16 started out very cold, about 35 degrees, and after several days of rain, it was a
cold, moist breeze at the boat, most all wore coats, hats and gloves at 8am when we started. By
mid day, it was well into the seventies
and hotter than anyone ever thought possible. Several,
including myself, reported sun burns from too much sun, and not enough protection… Lesson
learned… I hope!
Volume1 Issue 3 June 2011
As Murphy is always a part of any project,
we started out with a long delay, when the
keys t
o the pad
-
lock on the tower were not
the right keys. It took about an hour to
finally get it opened and to get the tower
tilted over.
Once the tower was down, we removed the
beam from the mast and sent the tower back
up to get it out of the way. Working
in 2
man crews, each of the Elements were each
removed from the boom, and completely
disassembled and inspected for damage.
Since the antenna and tower had been reported to
have fallen to the ground at one time, we expected
to see some damage and repai
rs to the antenna,
but not to the extent we found. The driven
element’s mounting block was broken, and fell
apart, which explained why the antenna element
was hanging at a 45 degree angle from then others
when we got there.
The 4th element, a parasitic
for 10 M, literally feel
apart as the element had fractured and broken in
the mounting. We are lucky it had not fallen off
the antenna and hit the ground. Upon looking at it,
it was heavily damaged in the fall and someone
had used electrical tape to tape t
he element up too hold it better in its mounting. I guess it was
not fully broken at the time, so it
was taped. But then through
years of use, the antenna blowing
in the wind, the metal fatigued
and broke inside the mounting
sleeve. The only thing holding
the element to the antenna was
the electrical tape, and its friction
to the inside of the mounting
sleeve. This required the
fabrication of an all
-
new element
for the antenna to go back up.
John N5TBM and James NN5Q
did a fabulous ad hock
fabrication job o
f the new 10
-
meter element!
ww2ok