KZ0C – Mike O’Connor

It’s mid-summer and I’ve decided to break the tower on the hill project into smaller chunks so’s to be able to get it done. So I’m putting a tower up next to the house. The good news is that I can use the tower as the base-tower when I finally go up on the hill. More good news — a lot of the remote-control, Internet-controlled-radio stuff can be debugged here in the comfort of my office instead of constantly shuttling about a mile up to the shack-on-the-hill.

Here are pictures of the tower going up…

This is the beginning of the hole I dug for the foundation. I wound up going about 4 feet deep.

This next one is the “backing boards” I had the lads put on the side of the house. There’s a long story in why I had to redo the house-wrap and siding on a 5-year old house. You don’t want to know. But one of the good things was that it gave me a chance to add these boards to the side of the house, which give me something nice and sturdy to screw the tower-brackets into.

The big day! Here are a couple of the lads taking a break from assembling the tower. We got really good at drilling out the holes in the tower to make them big enough for the bolts to fit.

Another shot — getting pretty close to assembled here.

Putting up the house brackets. This is way easier when you have a lift. I love that lift!

Now it’s time to lift the tower up. We just wrapped a chain around the tower and the lift-bucket and used the lift as a crane. No, you’re not supposed to do this. There are warning stickers all over the lift complaining about this kind of thing. But the tower is only 40 feet tall and really light, so we did it anyway. Nobody died.

Here’s another view…

Truing up the tower and bolting it to the house brackets.

Lookin’ gooood!

Doesn’t look like much here, but there’s a LOT of concrete in that hole now. We kinda lost count, but at least 25 bags. That tower is going nowhere.

A great day. A few weeks to let the concrete set up and it’ll be time to go up and mount the rotor and the antenna.