Today, my ham antennas have to come down. Partially, anyway, because starting tomorrow, the tree service may begin removing the giant hackberry tree and the two-of-three-trunks-remaining maple.
Both trees have been involved in supporting my antennas, though the hackberry was not a major part of the supports for my G5RV. The "Carolina Windom" off-center-fed multiband dipole is another story -- the feedpoint transformer hangs from the maple. I'm not sure if I'll be able to to anything with it before Spring.
My guess is that they'll show up inconveniently early or not at all.
The tree service started out strong -- established firm, professional estimate, in line with other estimates I'd gotten for the work in the past -- and then, once I'd accepted he estimate but before any money had changed hands, they went silent. No reply to e-mail. Okay, they were busy, then we had the Christmas and New Year's holidays, but then.... I telephoned them last week, and they were nice but non-committal (bear in mind, these are big trees in tight quarters, power and telephone drops strung on each side of them, calling for specialized equipment), then called back that afternoon and asked, "How about next Monday?"
Okay. So down come the antennas, the grill and firepit get tucked in the narrow walkway between the garage and the fence and I'll see what happens next.
Good luck with your antenna farm.
ReplyDeleteI had to move the end point of my 10-40 sloper to a temporary home on my fence while the neighbor figures out to do with their dying silver maple (one limb hangs over my garage and was a very convenient attachment point).
ReplyDeleteI need to to attach a pole of some sort to the back of the garage to replace it. I would really prefer to get it to a point where no one at ground level can come into contact with it.
I still have a 10M vertical (converted from an 11 Meter antenna) and a 20M rotatable dipole on my 35ft tower (the other connection and feed line point of the sloper), so I'm not totally down.
Good luck with the tree company and getting everything back up.
Do you subscribe to the theory that you get 1db of gain for every degree below freezing when you put up an antenna? ;-)