It’s on! The quorum present at the Dayton meeting voted to authorize W0CG to proceed with this project. We don’t have all the needed funds yet, but thanks to several very generous donations we are about two thirds there, so it was decided to proceed, counting on the balance of the needed funds to come along when the time comes. The plan is to arrange for the tower and lots of associated hardware and equipment to arrive at the QTH in mid-October. We’ll immediately begin painting and assembling the sections. First will be a coat of epoxy primer, which is light tan. Over that there will be a coat of epoxy white finish paint. Using white will make it extremely easy to assure that we don’t miss even the smallest spot. The third coat will be epoxy machine grey, also very easy to manage on top of a white coat. We’ll assemble the tower with all stainless steel hardware (not the galvanized stuff provided by Rohn). It will be laid in the back yard on wood blocks in place for the crane to pick it up and into position on the tower base in early 2019 once all the other needed prep is complete.
We’re hoping to be able to take advantage of DX Engineering’s very competitive domestic freight rates and piggy-back shipment of many of our own packed boxes (such as the newest AL-1200 and lots of tower parts) onto the shipment of the 10 tower sections to Miami. DX Engineering specializes in domestic freight prep and shipping, and I’m friends with most of the guys who work there. More on that as it develops. Once we get the stuff to Miami, the ocean freight portion is easy and less costly than the domestic freight. We have considerable experience doing this.
Concurrent with the tower prep we’ll assemble our new 40 meter yagi and reinforce it on the island for the Curacao harsh conditions. We have bought that XM-240 and it’s presently in the shipment staging pile at W0CG in Ohio. We’ll also do considerable prep work on the guy wires. See the comprehensive plan for the tower replacement for full details.
We learned from experience, and this tower will be done in a way that eliminates as many of the salt and corrosion vulnerabilities of our location as possible. There will, for example, be NO ELECTRICAL TAPE on the legs, as that is the number one source of corrosion. Many other lessons we have learned will be applied in the new installation.
Much of this Phase I work will be done by the CQWW SSB and CW crews. We’re hoping some ops will be able to come a bit early and stay over to help. We’ll also have professional climbers involved. Again, all the detail is in the plan that you already have in hand.
Our hope is that everything will be ready to raise the new tower in early 2019.
The Rough Numbers
We presently have about $15K in the tower fund and about $5K (after membership renewals) in the general PJ2T operating fund. That tower money will be spent VERY quickly in the coming weeks, but we’re at least not in the financial crisis mode that has characterized so much of our PJ2T operations in the past.
