Dear Editor: In the Opinion section of the Dec. 17 issue, you printed my comments on tower safety. In that letter I noted that radio services beyond broadcasting would also do well to enforce safety practices in their tower work.

As I noted then, the San Diego contest club, NX6T, has access to the “antenna farm” at WA6TQT’s mountaintop location in Anza, Calif., but had suffered for years from a failed 160-meter TRI-Square phasing cable.

Here’s a quick update.

A couple of weeks ago, a tower climber was hired to replace the phasing cable. The center conductor had literally come apart.

Instead of paying $1,000 or more, it cost us about $800 for four hours of tower climbing (and rappelling back down) to replace the cabling.

I tested the antenna during Saturday evening’s Stew Perry 160-Meter contest. While the antenna now radiates better than it ever has in years, the phasing network at the base still needs adjustment: pointing the antenna S-E seemed to make no difference, while several stations in the Caribbean and on the north tip of South America were worked with the antenna pointing N-E. Go figure.

As I said in December, if the wires had been hoisted properly in the first place, it would have been a simple matter to lower them and make repairs. But the important thing is that our repairs, when finally completed, were conducted safely with no accident complications.

Was it worth the 3-1/2 year wait for the right opportunity? We shall know with more certainty on the weekend of March 27 when we run the CQ WPX SSB contest.

Submit letters to the editor to radioworld@futurenet.com.

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