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W5KFT Contest Station

Last weekend I had the opportunity to operate the W5KFT Ranch for the 2002 WPX SSB contest.  Bryan Edwards is the owner of the station, and actually lives in Lubbock, TX, but built this site out in the country to escape the Power Line Noise and interference typically found in the city.

The ranch is approximately 2200 acres of Texas Hill country located on the west bank of Lake Buchanan.  Bryan's official site and station information is located here, but I wanted to get some of my photos posted, so here they are -

Here are some photos of their Lake View East, Southeast, and South. Here's the main house, and then the operating shack down by the water.  Robert, K5PI was also out there this weekend doing some Miscellaneous antenna work, as well as cosmetic.   In the photo, he's trimming the bushes in front of the window so we can look out and see the lake.

Here's some shots of the towers - The foreground is the Shack tower with a TH7 Tribander, and in the background are the 10/15 tower and the 20/40 tower.  Each of these two towers has stacked yagis pointed NE towards Europe, and the top antenna is rotatable.  In addition to the two main tall towers, there are two shorter towers, each with a TH-7 Tribander (One is the Shack Tower, and the other is pictured here).  This other tower has two rotatable TH7 tribanders.

For 10/15/20, this means you can have a dedicated stack of Yagi's pointing Northeast, a pair of TH7 Tribanders pointed Northwest towards Japan, and a third Tribander (Shack tower) pointed Southeast towards the Carribbean.  In addition, you can split the other two Tribanders - one NW and one Southwest for Australia. 

By utilizing StackMasters, you can feed all antennas simultaneously for running, and switch between each individual antennas for concentrating on one area, without having to rotate antennas much.  This worked great during WPX weekend and I was able to quickly switch around to catch stations in any direction.  The other cool thing was Robert, K5PI, could operate on 15m while I was on 10m and there was no interference between the two.  Bryan has some really good band-pass filtering in use, and the Kenwood TS-850's front-end handled it nicely.

Before I left for the Ranch on Friday I was showing the Main W5KFT website to some co-workers.  One of them asked if the antennas worked JUST by operating in close proximity, or did you have to connect coax (wire)to them?  I figured I'd snap a few shots of just how the signal gets there! Once it comes through the patch panel in the window, it travels down the wire support to the base of the tower.  It then goes up the tower to the antennas.

Here's a shot of some of the anchoring structures used to keep the towers from toppling over in the breeze.  I took a shot of Bryan's "Secret" grounding system as well.  In addition to HF, there's some good VHF/UHF antennas available.

Here's a shot of AC0W.

Inside the shack is the operating station, and also the Wall of awards for all the certificates earned form the station.

I also snapped some miscellaneous photos from the shore, from the field, and one from the main yard. Finally, here's a quick peek at the Full-Sized 160m Inverted Vee planned for this Spring.