| Beard Tower is located about 5km SE of
Manjimup and at 200' (61M) the tower is the tallest all metal look out
tower in the World. WARG gained permission to use the tower for a
coverage test using VK6REE. Members traveled to the site, mainly from Perth, and camped in the forest nearby to Beard Tower. It was too difficult to carry all the equipment up the 200' so a flying fox was rigged and all the equipment... Battery Coax Antenna VK6REE Duplexer Were hauled up via the flying fox. The duplexer went in two parts, 3 cavity filters for receive and 3 cavity filters for transmit. It was scary watching all this valuable equipment being pulled up the rope as the photograph below shows.  3 full size 2 metre cavity filters being hauled up the flying fox at Beard Tower  VK6REE
with binoculars attached
At
the base of the tower there was a lot of loose galvanised wire and this
caused intermittent desensing of VK6REE, crackle came and went with any
movement of the tower or wire. However this did not prevent a
successful test of the site and the coverage was good in the hilly
forest area.
Much talk about how the site might be used but nothing came of the idea. Youthful enthusiasm often over rides the hard work and ongoing maintenance required at an isolated repeater site, but great fun was had by all and the repeater was packed up and returned to Perth awaiting the next test location. |