Currently viewing the tag: "160M"

Super Heavy Duty guy anchor for the King.

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2 cubic meters of concrete were poured into the 2 meter deep hole that had previously been made in solid rock with the hydraulic rock breaker.

The weight of the concrete is 4.8 tonnes (10,560lbs) and with the additional rocks embedded in the concrete it weighs over 6 tonnes.

In addition, the concrete is bonded to the solid rock.

I then levelled the surrounding area with my backhoe loader, only the chain can be seen coming out of the ground.

I believe this will be strong enough even in the toughest weather.

Station 1BCG – 1921

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Several posts on the TopBand email reflector recently have mentioned station 1BCG in Greenwich, CT, the first radio station to transmit a message across the Atlantic on short waves i.e. on frequencies with a wavelength less than 200 meters.

QST magazine 1922 has articles about the first trans-Atlantic QSOs made by hams in 1921 and the antenna they used was essentially identical to the antenna being built at TF4M, except that rather than using two elevated radials at the bottom, they used a fan of around 30 elevated radials.

Any ARRL member can download the  articles at:

http://p1k.arrl.org/cgi-bin/topdf.cgi?id=4359&pub=qst

http://p1k.arrl.org/cgi-bin/topdf.cgi?id=4360&pub=qst

http://p1k.arrl.org/cgi-bin/topdf.cgi?id=4361&pub=qst

More information about the 1BCG station can be found at




I have no doubt that my antenna will perform superbly, especially given it´s superior location near the sea.

Across open waters

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The site for the 160M transmit antenna was chosen to have the propagation path run across open waters for more than 180° of the horizon.

The photos are taken at high tide.

Long live the King

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The King has risen.

With the help of a 25 ton crawler excavator equipped with a hydraulic rock breaker, a 2.5 m deep hole was broken into the solid rock. The 27 metre long pole weighing 3 tonnes was then inserted into the hole and secured with rocks around the base and temporary guy wires.

New guy anchors will be inserted into the rock and the King will support a 160M transmit vertical antenna before winter.

The photos were taken by Finnbjörn Bjarnason using my camera.

Beverage Antennas at TF4M

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I have finished the Beverage antenna project for the time being.

I built 4 bi-directional Beverage antennas ranging from 170m to 380m long.

The antennas are connected into the radio shack via 5000 feet of RG-6 CATV cable entering via a patch panel and fed into a K9AY RAS8x2 matrix antenna switch which then feeds the 8 directions available into two transceivers.

The picture shows the center lines of the main lobe of each antenna direction. The lobes are quite broad especially on the lower frequencies, so I believe I have relatively good coverage.

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