More of W7YRV's Antenna Farm


At the SADXA meeting on January 21, we enjoyed a photo presentation by Roy - W7YRV. Roy was 70 years old when he began his dream project on the 40 acres where he and his XYL lived up in Maricopa. You know how you have dreams about doing something big? Well, Roy did it. Over the next 11 years, this guy raised some SERIOUS antennas, and amazingly, he single handedly built multiple towers up to 200 feet in height and using his unschooled understanding of mechanics and physics, stood them up! He did so with nothing more than come-along winches, steel cable, tubing and steel and aluminum pipe along with his trusty Volkswagon pickup. Very impressive! Even more impressive, he climbed them all! The pictures neither do justice to the amount of work required nor demonstrate the safety issues that must have been on his mind. As told by Roy, he only had one mishap when he took a shortcut resulting in a dropped tower. By using excruciating attention to detail and taking extraordinary time to accomplish tasks, such as taking hours to hand winch a tower to a vertical position , Roy managed to create several full sized HF wire antennas, none of which would have satisfied O.S.H.A. So? He even had an event involving a helicopter that managed to clip one of his towers. Did I say that he lived in the middle of nowhere? *Read Roy's words describing his "Antenna Farm" plus his method of raising a 60 foot tower:* *Roy's Antenna Farm* *Raising a 60-Foot Antenna*