K0XG Why Rotate PAGE


	Why Rotate The Tower ?

In the past few years, new equipment upgrades and additional frequencies covering a 160-440 mhz range have created a dilemma in deciding the quantity of antennas to use and how to rotate the multitude of beam antennas required to make the operation efficient.

One solution is to purchase a chrome molly pipe and one of the larger rotors, but this only allows limited stacking of small Yagi’s to cover several bands. Although this is fairly good for three or four antennas, it becomes a very expensive solution if you want to cover many bands.

Another solution is to add devices to the tower that will allow beams to be rotated around the tower. This is a good solution, but a very expensive proposition.

One of the most cost effective and reliable methods to rotate many antennas is to rotate the whole tower. It may seem very complicated and costly to rotate a whole tower (or part of a tower). But a cost comparison between multiple static towers and a single rotating tower proves that rotating the whole tower is the most cost effective solution.

There are many other benefits to justify the installation of a rotating tower. Coax or hardline can be reduced to one cable, as well as the control cable for rotors. Furthermore, the number of direction indication units in the shack can be reduced.

With the multitude of band decoders and automatic antenna switches (such as the Unified Microsystems (W9XT) and Top Ten Devices and the Array Solutions equipment), it is very easy to automate the antenna selection process on the rotating tower and get only one feed-line and one control cable to achieve a clean reliable multi-band setup.

Another benefit is the ease in which the antenna direction positioning can be done via most logging software on each band. This is done via a packet spotting network using the EA4DX interface, AlfaSpid controller, or the Idiom Press hardware.