This weekend I managed to pull a few more hours of work on the 80m yagi. All the elements were guyed properly last weekend, thanks to Hans SM0BYD for the help! This weekend I concentrated on changing the contol cables for the relay boxes on the elements and also reviewing their status. I brought the relay box for the driven element home since I need to change both control cable and incoming coaxial cable. It's getting cold outside so better do this stuff at home where you can stay nice and warm. During the week I discovered that the control relay matrix that was up on the antenna was broken. I made this so I could only run 4 leads from the house and control all different relay combinations, since the reflector/director and driven boxes are configured differently depending on what band segment the beam is at. I'm not sure what the cause could be but perhaps lightning that killed a few 800V 4 amp diodes! When I was about to test the relays in the driven element box one of the relay packs had a short circuit, I started investigating and also found a shorted diode on one of the relays. So I changed it and now everything seems to be working as it should. On saturday eveneing happy about the successful box repairs I cooked a great schrip soup for myself and my girlfriend, it was really delicious =) We had some perfectly tempered dry Riesling wine with the soup that we brought back home in the summer as we toured the Mosel valley in Germany. On sunday the weather was perfect to continue outside so I drove up to the station and replaced the control cables to the outer boxes. Dag SM0KDG also came up and he did some mods to the lifting device we have on top of the mast pipe. Drilling in the thick pipe whilst doing rope access! Dag also painted all the hardware myself and Hans put on the guy wires last weekend, like turnbuckles, wire-locks etc. Great job Dag! Here are som pics from the weekend!

73 de Teemu SM0W