Part 1 of relocating "Henry"

May 26, 2001 at around 10:00am, Bruce - KA1TWX,  and Jack - N1NGF were joined by Joel - WA1ZYX, with K1D, and K1DO in tow, at Kmart in Keene.  Shortly after that Dale - N1NCI arrived with one of his offsping.  It was at this point that I  discovered that I left the building keys at the house in Surry, so back I went to get those, telling the rest that I'd meet them at the gate to the summit.  With keys in pocket, I headed out for the 2nd time.  I was hoping that this wasn't a sign of how the entire day was going to go......It was...... more on that later.

Okay, so I arrived at the road, and now added to the crew was Dave, K1ZS.  Hummm, this is going to be interesting - 5 adults, 3 kids and ONE 4x4!  Okay, everybody in the back...

It was a sloooow and very bumpy ride up that goat path, but we all made it just fine - I think...  Once we reached the top, we immediately went to work.  Dale began getting ready to climb the tower while I started identifying feedlines and getting the repeater ready for removal.  We snapped one last photo of "Henry" in it's former home - the only one it has ever known since it first went on the air back in the 70's as WR1AHO - KEENE.

Within minutes of taking the above phone, I turned off the controller, and began disassembly.  

After the repeater was physically removed from the building, it was time to remove the three feedlines.  The 7/8 heliax for the primary repeater, the 1/2 heliax for the 220 link and the run of 9913 on the 440 link.  We started with the 9913, easiest.....  the 1/2" wasn't real bad, but the 7/8" was a real bugger.  One of the downfalls of being one of the oldest tenants at a site, is that everybody after you, uses your feedlines to tiewrap their stuff to.  And all kinds of other cables are tangled in amongst yours.

Dave, Bruce and I worked on the inside while Jack tugged from the outside.  It actually worked out pretty good.  It did take the three of us inside to "snake" the 7/8" around stuff.  Speaking of Snake....

After the feedlines were out of the way, I was messing around with the repeater, tipping it upside down and shaking it around to get the mouse crap out of it.  (we had placed it on the ground behind my truck).  I didn't want all that stuff in my truck!  When I got the machine back upright and was looking around in between things, something happened to catch my eye.....  Hummmm, that doesn't look right....

Allow me to introduce you all to "Sammy the Snake".  Well, that explains why we haven't had any mice recently...

Dale needed some help up on the tower to speed things along.  After all, we had three antennas to take down and all the hardware, mounting pipes, brackets, stay-braces (The insulating top support for the Super StationMaster antenna), feedlines and various other things.  The sky was beginning to blacken and we needed to get things done soon.  I put on my climbing belt, grabbed by climbing bucket and headed for the sky.

(You thought I was kidding about the sky turning black!!!)  Well we did beat the rain, but not by much.  We weren't off the tower with everything more than 15 minutes and down it came.

We brought everything over to the new location, actually some of it was brought over while others were busy with other projects.  Notice the tired men in this one...

The boys did and OUTSTANDING job in helping, especially with "Sammy".

Then, when all was said and done, the temporary repeater was installed and turned on - and we discovered one small glitch...We had to reprogram the radios... Dan had arrived by now, so some of the crew at least had a more comfortable ride down.   So, we packed up, headed down that Goat Path of a road, had lunch, grabbed what we needed and headed back up in the now pouring rain.  The radios were corrected and this time, everything worked just fine...  The end result is a lot less impressive than Henry Sr, but Little Henry will work just fine until the big guy is cleaned up and reconfigured.

The Bottom cabinet houses the duplexers, the actual repeater consists of the little radios sitting on top of the duplexers.

That's it for now.  Not much to look at.  Bare Bones.  No bells.  No whistles.  No nothing except a time-out timer.  Not even a courtesy beep.  Just a couple blinking lights.  Even needs to be manually ID'ed - remember folks,  "thru the K1TQY Repeater" every 10 minutes while it's in use.

Stay tuned for Part 2 - The Re-building of the repeater.

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