Established 1984
The West 48 Foot VHF / UHF tower
The first tower was installed just a few years later in 1987 and is mounted on the south west side of the house, This tower it is approximately 48 feet tall and has many VHF & UHF antennas. There is a ten foot section buried about six feet into the ground directly in the concrete base which is tied into the house foundation. The tower is also bolted to the house at four and twenty feet.
This tower hinges over at the four foot mount and drops down into the driveway for maintenance.
(click on images to enlarge)
During the really active years for packet radio the KA1RCI PBBS was passing anywhere between fifty and sixty five thousand messages a year. Between 1988 and 1993 it was possibly one the most active PBBS systems in New England with over 350 registered users that checked in on a weekly if not daily basis.
A tower falls with a thunderous crash...
With activity at an all time high we scheduled some maintenance on the 48 foot tower to add some new antennas and replace all the the coax runs. The tower was tilted down early on a Saturday morning without incident and all the work was completed by the end of the day with no problems.
The next morning the crew gather back to raise the tower using a bright yellow nylon rope with a block and tackle arrangement that lowered and raised the tower. Once the tower was ready we would use my fathers little pickup truck to pull the rope through the pulleys to raise it back up; this process had been completed several times in the past with great success.
Unfortunately, this time, we were not so lucky...
No one is exactly sure what happened that day but just as the tower reached the house bracket at the very top of the roof, the nylon rope failed. I believe that the tower when up to quickly, with a great deal of momentum, and smacked the house bracket with such force that it bounced back away from the house breaking the rope.
The end result was a thunderous crash as the tower fell to the ground landing on both the truck (which I was driving) and my father! While everyone else in our assembled group had the good sense to run AWAY from the falling tower, my father ran towards it, with his arms stretched out over his head...
He actually tried to catch the falling tower!
Thankfully the roof of the truck took the brunt of the blow and kept the tower from killing my father, although he did leave a rather impressive imprint of his ass in the crushed stone driveway...
Several sections of tower were damaged and the call went out for help.
Dick K1CVP had just purchased a tower from Dick W1XJ a few weeks before this incident. My Dad and I had picked up the tower at W1XJ's house and delivered to K1CVP's house using my truck and race car trailer so I knew where there were several sections of tower sitting idle on the ground...
We ran over to Dick K1CVP's house and he donated the sections we needed to make quick repairs on my damaged tower. Dad and I stayed up all night cutting apart the damaged sections of tower, replacing them with sections of WXJ's tower that K1CVP had donated, and reinstalling all the antennas we had just worked on the day before.
We did have one other problem that was not so easily solved. When the tower fell the front leg of the tower, which furthest from the house, was badly bent and the strength was obviously compromised. This is the section of tower that is buried in the ground, and is also incase in concrete so there was no way to "replace" this section of tower, and we had no choice except to repair that section in place.
Syl N1DKF provided a very strong length of steel pipe that was just the right size outer diameter to fit snugly inside the bent leg of the tower. First we used this length of pipe as a pry bar to bend the leg back into a vertical position and then pounded it down inside the leg of the tower reinforcing it from inside.
Next we borrowed a gas powered portable welder from my brother-in-laws friend and Scott welded that section onsite.
In this group of photos below you can see my brother-in-law Scott (Sandy's younger brother) making repairs to the tower. After the steel pipe was hammered into place, with grandpa's sledge hammer in photos, Scott welded several gussets into place to make the base section near the hinge point much stronger.
(click on images to enlarge)
Once all the repair work was done, the bent sections replaced or repaired as needed, I purchased a 500 foot spool of steel cable to replace the yellow nylon rope and we hoisted the tower back into place in less than 24 hours. My father and I worked through the night Sunday into Monday, with help from many others, to get the tower back up. Then I spend another several hours, running all the feed-line back into the radio room, getting the PBBS back on the air.
The entire event was over in less than 72 hours...
... and the repaired tower was back up and in service.
(click on images to enlarge)
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