With all of the high winds we have been experiencing lately I was not surprised that one arm of my bamboo 10/15 meter trap dipole broke off close to the central support. It turned out that it was only inserted about half an inch into the central support so it was not very surprising that it broke. The antenna wire stopped the bamboo pole from going too far so no further damage was done.
The repair was easy to make and the dipole is now much stronger than it was before but when I tried to pump up the Scam 12 mast I found it would not take in any air and I could not raise the mast to check the antenna. I had not planned to use the mast until the first UK AC Contest of the year on Tuesday so I think I would have been mildly upset if I had discovered that problem just before the start of the contest.
I have a compressor in the shed that I use to pump the mast up. Being in the shed and muffled under a work bench keeps it reasonably quiet so that it does not disturb the neighbours if I need to re-pressurise the mast in order to lower it after a UK AC Contest at around 23.00.
The compressor has a 15 meter length of hose to the mast which is slightly too long so I had just made a couple of coils and stuffed them under the shed out of the way. All I could hear above the compressor working was the hiss of escaping air coming from under the shed. Upon closer examination a short section of the reinforced air hose had been gnawed through and all of my precious air was escaping.
I quickly shortened the hose but, not having any air hose fittings, I managed to source some aluminium tubing that fitted tightly inside the air hose and secured a short length into the hose with a couple of jubilee clips.
Now the hose is routed safely away from the shed with no surplus coils and hopefully away from whatever is living underneath it. I don't begrudge the little critter a nice warm home but I am not so charitable about its jaw exercise workout upon my air hose.
As my longer HF dipole for 80/40 is supported on a different pole on the side of the house I was not planning on raising the Scam mast until just before the next VHF Contest. So all in all a bit of a fortunate problem solved with time to spare.
I just hope that the winds subside a bit before this coming Tuesday. The forecast is not very optimistic. Good luck to all Contesters and operators for 2014.
73 de Jim G0HGH
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