The Best Monday We’ve Had in a While

I just can’t wait till Saturday to tell you about the terrific Monday we had here. After failing to get the new FM tower up last week, we did some assessments and made a few changes to get ready for the next attempt. First, we lightened the load by about 160 pounds by removing the antennas and associated hardware. I redesigned the pulley system atop the big tripod. I made it so that when the rope goes above the pulley, it catches the bolt at the top of the pulley and just lifts all that hardware off the top of the tripod, which makes for a straighter pull. It was pretty cool to see it work as designed, but a couple people were a little alarmed because we forgot to tell everybody that it was supposed to do that.

We seemed to get off to a slow start, though. Peter and I went to see a listener friend who offered the use of his block and tackle gear for pulling up the tower. That seemed to take forever. Then we needed longer rope than what the borrowed gear had. Buying the rope was an even slower process. They guys who coiled it for us put a couple thousand twists in it, which I had to take out. It takes a loooonnng time to untwist 320 feet of rope! But once we got it rigged up, things went unbelievably quickly.

Our helpers showed up at around 2:30 and we were almost ready for them. We had a few of the same people in the group who helped last week and lots of new faces. I really appreciated Antonio’s help with the rigging and knot typing. He used to be a seaman so he really knows that stuff. Steven was another big help to me with the rigging. Most of the gang came in a big tourist bus driven by Antonio. Our friend, Jeremy, has a high school choir here from Seattle this week doing concerts and he loaded the boys into Antonio’s bus. They were a great bunch of tower pusher-uppers. In fact, Mildred and I plan to go hear them tonight in Flowers Bay.

Another change I made was using the triple block and tackle setup I mentioned above rather than come-alongs for pulling the tower. It turned out that with the changes we made to the pulley system, the block and tackle were serious over-kill. Once the people pushing got the tower up to about 45 degrees, Steven, Antonio, and I just grabbed the whole bundle of ropes and pulled it right up. It was seriously cool to see that 70′ tower rise up from behind the security wall as we watched and pulled from way down the hill.

Now we can see the tower from our house. It is dwarfed by the nearby cell towers, but we still like it. With binoculars, we can just make out the flags that Oliver and Alice Henderson made for it.

Mildred, Sandi and Marlies were up there yesterday, too, taking lots and lots of pictures. I’ve put a few up here so you can get a better idea what was going on. I’ve also included the HRGS Audio Update, which we just recorded this morning.

When I had previously mentioned that Monday was going to be the day for raising the tower, lots of people said they would be praying. We can’t thank you enough for that! Now, we move on to mounting the antennas and brackets, installing the lightning protection, finishing the wiring for the transmitter room, building a new rack for the transmitter and related equipment, installing and connecting the studio-transmitter-link hardware, and then – finally – relocating our FM transmitter to the new and improved location. Whew! I get tired just thinking about it.

To hear the Audio Update, you’ll need to go back to the home page. For some reason, when I used the “more” command to break this up, it put the audio file only on that page and not here on the page with the whole blog entry. Very strange.

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