K8CX Tower Photo - September 2016

Tom Roscoe K8CX in his hamshack in 2016.
My station is a Yaesu FT1000MP (recently refurbished and tuned by WA4GEG), Yaesu FT450D used for portable operations and 6 Meters, Ameritron AL1500 amplifier, SB200 standby amp, plus various accessories.
There are 2 computers in my hamshack. The one shown on the left is tied into the station (RTTY, contest software, audio recording, etc.). The second computer (not shown) is used mostly to take care of HamGallery.com, read email, and graphics editing.

My main interests are DXing and contesting.

On September 3, 2016, several hours of work was done on the back tower at K8CX by Tim Jellison W3YQ.
The Tailtwister rotator with a broken gear was replaced with a Yaesu G-2000DXA. The 2 element 40 Meter beam and mast was moved from the top of the tower at 130' to 140' to make room for a 5 element 20 Meter OWA beam to be installed in the spring.
Five rope loops on pulleys were installed on top of the tower, 2 rope loops were installed at other points on the tower to make pulling up wire antennas easier.
A 4 element switchable 80 Meter sloper system will be back in action soon after repairing broken wires and corroded relay contacts.
A 30 Meter sloper was also pulled to 130' by one of the rope loops.
A rope was replaced from the top of the 130' tower to my 80' tower (also on pulleys). This rope supports a 1/4 wave 160 Meter vertical with 120 quarter wave radial in the ground. A 50/32 ohm unun was installed at the feed point at the base of the vertical. The wire size of the vertical element was changed from 14 AWG to 10 AWG. A 4' capacitive hat added to the top of the vertical around 120' level. This gave me a 40 khz spread on 160M with SWR at 1.2 / 1.
A rope was run from the 80' level across to my 80' tower which will support a high flat dipole, perhaps 17 Meters for now.

My 80' tower supports a TH7DX at 80' and a 7 element 6 Meter beam at 90'.
There are plans to change out the TH7DX to a Skyhawk tribander or possibly monobanders on 10 & 15 Meters.