I am now installing pole hardware for the guy wires on the two side poles of the 160M antenna.
All guy anchors are also in place.
Currently viewing the tag: "The King"
The 1-5/8″ LDF7 Heliax cable going out to the King is in two parts. I spliced the two cables together and in the absence of assembly instructions, it took a while to accomplish.
If anyone has a copy of the assembly instructions for this kind of splice connector, I would be grateful.
I measured the cable from the shack end with my CIA-HF Antenna analyser from AEA and I measured the cable loss at 50MHz at 3.8dB.
My calculations indicate that the cable loss at 1.8Mhz should then be less than 0.7 dB for the cable run to the antenna.
I measured the cable length with the analyser and found it to be 1966.4 feet (599.358 meters) at 1% accuracy.
The cable has a 88% velocity factor and 0.098dB attenuation/100 meters at 2.0 MHz and the power handling is 115kW.
I still need 110meters more cable to reach the antenna though…am working on this.
The line isolator is a W1JR design purchased from Array Solutions.
The balun has sufficient choking reactance for 160m which is difficult to achieve with other designs.
The working platform at the feedpoint is now completed.
I have now run the 1-5/8″ Heliax cable out, but it was 110 meters short….
The cable was run through the road with plastic pipes for protection.
I am also putting the finishing touches on the working platform at 3 meters height on the King.
The 700m long coax cable to the antenna is too short… Once the cable has been run under the road and is in the ditch, it will become clear how much more coax is needed to reach the antenna.
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.
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.
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.
I use large rocks with a hole drilled through as anchors for the guy wires.
