Wow- nice! What's your opinion of tiltovers vs Hazers? My dad had a 100' fixed piece of old steel broadcast tower that we put up with a ginpole...it was a pain to do any work on- it was 'grab the belts and head on up' if there was anything serious to do. It would hardly wiggle since it was so beefy. But it sure was nice to use- tribander with a rotatable 40m dipole and a 2m yagi, all on heliax. It had to come down when the property was sold. That, too, was a pain. I can't quite tell- What are you putting on top?
Haven't ever owned or worked on a Hazer system but I suspect they have similar problems as the fold overs, mainly that guy wires get in the way of bringing things up and down. If they're free-standing that helps quite a bit, but free-standing needs to be really beefy and lots of concrete under them.
This one is a Rohn 45 fold-over that's 60' tall and winches over at 30'. The procedure to fold it is to climb to the 30' point and un-pin two bolts, then down to the bottom of that "backbone" hinge and un-pin that while tied off below it, then back to the ground and run the winch backward. It'll pretty much let itself down and you're just slowing its progress with the winch.
You also have to turn the antenna system "flat" with the rotor first so they don't dig into the ground. If the reason you're laying it over is a rotor problem, then you get to climb all the way up and release the mast from the rotor (it's in a thrust bearing) and spin it by hand to there and then lock it back down.
On the way down you stop when either the long HF yagi is about to hit the ground or a guy wire on that side, depending on yagi size.
So you're still going to have to climb sometimes. No getting completely away from that with any tower.
With the middle fold over you also have to pay attention to where the disconnected guys go when it's folding over. You have to work them so they stay on the proper side of the tower and he lower set of guys when it comes back up.
With proper weatherproofing and what not, the array rarely needs work. This was only the sixth time it has been folded over in 12 years in the same location.
As far as antennas go, the stack you see in the upside down photo is the stack that'll go back on it to start, unless I have a longer boom VHF yagi in the collection somewhere. Moseley with 40M add-on kit, the long M2 6m and UHF and I'm not sure what the 2m is (but another M2 would be nice!) and the long 1.2GHz yagi at the top.
Ham V rotor with the mod for "point and shoot" (the electronics run the rotor backward a degree to unbind the system and then release the brake, turn the rotor and then let it coast to a stop before reapplying the brake, unless you override them, saving a lot of wear and tear on the brake and torque on the whole system) handles the rotation duties.
The other "problem" with any fold over or Hazer system is the need for flexible cables that can bend with the tower. For us VHF+ nuts we'd rather run 7/8" hardline all the way to the top. I'll e replacing the tower cable after 12 years outdoors and I'm thinking that LMR super-flex *might* work but I have to check bend radius limits and see if I can loop some way that'll allow the tower to come over. Alternatively one could run the hardline to just below the 30' point on this tower and then have a connector box to tradition to something with more loss that's flexible halfway up. The previous owner made that transition at ground level in an electrical box bolted to the first section near the base. Definitely not going to be able to run waveguide up it for the higher bands.
Thinking that anything above 1.2G will be placed on the rooftop tower that's currently on the garage roof. Currently that holds a rotatable HF dipole and a log periodic for 6M-1.2GHz which is a poor excuse for a gain antenna no matter how you slice it, but it worked "well enough" to get by for a couple of years. Lightweight Yaesu rotor on that tower should be able to handle a BBQ grill dish for the microwaves or a pile of higher band horizontal yagis.
West is blocked by the ridge so working folks on the microwaves is pointing at the 14er peaks anyway, so uncoupling the VHF yagi for liaison work from the direction the microwave gear is pointing is pretty much a necessity to work the fixed microwave folks in the Front Range anyway. Even Pueblo works better with both ends bouncing off of Pikes Peak.
Can't say I'll be doing what another guy here did though. Worked every county in Colorado on 10GHz with a dish at both ends pointed at aircraft. Big turbofan engines make excellent RF reflectors (as our military folks already know) and you can even count the RPM of the blades on an oscilloscope at 10 GHz. Ha. He gave a presentation on it. Took him and a friend (who drove the rover van) years to get that all done. I'm not quite that motivated.
The missing antenna from both planned arrays is 222 MHz and that's a shame. It's such an excellent and quiet band. My furthest contact on 222 was via a tropo duct to near Orlando, FL. Besides FL, we've worked Texas and Oklahoma multiple times (even Texas on 432 MHz) and various surrounding States.
The best way to see if you got the antenna system and pre-amps right is to see if you can talk from here out to Larry N0LL out in Smith Center Kansas on all the VHF+ stuff. We get him as a fairly regular check in on the Rocky Mtn VHF+ Net.
The only other downside of those long boom yagis is you'll completely miss someone calling off to the side where they aren't pointed. I need to put up a pole with a few Big Wheel or similar horizontal gain onmi antennas just to hear the weak ones off to the side of the beams... eventually.
The former owner had a cross arm for hanging wire antennas off of the tower for 80 and 160 and got some impressive results off of those. He handed me the insulators and capacitors to shunt feed the tower and said he just never got around to it. 60' with a stack of beams acting as a capacitance top hat isn't ideal for 160, but it'd be interesting to see how well it plays as a vertical antenna.
Nice! Maybe if you petition the right folks you can get some of these beauties installed for your neighbors to enjoy too!
Those are a lot bigger than most antenna towers and are probably making it possible for you to post here, unless you're on a self-contained solar/generator system. If you're dead set against them, I'm sure we could arrange to have your service disconnected. It's sure to lower that continual whining noise coming from your keyboard.
