Some photos from the project.

Sections of Rohn-55g on the ground.

Bearing installation on the tower (left to right: Dale, K5ZXH; Matt, KC1XX; Jussi, AA6KJ).

Theodore inspecting the foundation and the rotor

The first piece of Rohn-55g on the rotor

All 140′ of Rohn-55g up!

Antennas going up!

All done!

I worked 15m single band (high power, unassisted); about 30 hours. Some issues during the contest:

• 5 hour power outage on Sunday morning. Of course, there was a great EU opening during that time! G E N E R A T O R next time…
• hamlib/rigctld keying problems that required frequent restarting of both not1mm and rigctld. Switching to cwdaemon for the next contest.
• It was cold in the shack! I need to work on the insulation!

But still the contest went much better than last year (… new antennas …): 1344 QSOs, 122 countries, and 35 zones.

The following software works great (on Arch Linux):

• General logging: qlog which can be found from both AUR and Flatpak
• Digital modes: WSJT-X_improved from AUR
• Contesting: not1mm. I recommend using cwdaemon for generating CW rather than CAT with rigctld. The latter is buggy and can crash frequently. Install using the uv system (python).
• Elecraft K4 radio software: QK4.

145′ Rotating Rohn 55 tower (tower hardware & installation KC1XX) 

Antennas:

• 160m/80m inverted L with 80 radials
• 60m dipole
• 40m 3 element yagi (JK Antennas) at 145′
• 30m 2 element yagi (JK Antennas) at 105′
• 20m 3/3 yagi stack (JK Antennas) at 132′ and 90′
• 17m 3 element yagi (JK Antennas) at 105′
• 15m 4/4 yagi stack (JK Antennas) at 132′ and 90′
• 12m 4 element yagi (JK Antennas) at 105′
• 10m 5/5 yagi stack (JK Antennas) at 132′ and 90′
• 6m 6 element LFA yagi (InnovAntennas) at 52′
• Antenna switching: Hamation Bandmaster V controller
  and DX Engineering RR8B-HP remote switch
• Stack match: Hamation PB-2 controller and Hamation
  SM-2 switching unit
• Rotor: K0XG rotor and bearings from KC1XX
  and Green Heron RT-21 controller
• UNUNs & BALUNS from Balun Designs
• LMR-600 UltraFlex and 7/8″ Heliax coaxial cables from Davis RF

Elecraft K4 with KPA-1500 & Acom 2000A amplifiers.

If one starts cwdaemon directly on Linux, it produces rather choppy and poor CW. So, I experimented a bit and it seems that the following will produce nice and consistent CW:

# echo 1 > /sys/bus/usb-serial/devices/ttyUSB1/latency_timer
# chrt -f 99 /usr/bin/cwdaemon -d /dev/ttyUSB1 -o key=DTR -o ptt=none -x n

This reduces the rs232 port latency (1st line; 1 ms latency), runs cwdaemon with real time priority (chrt command) and disables audio output on the computer (-x n). In my case above /dev/ttyUSB1 is the RS232 port for the radio, which uses DTR signal for keying.

Once can put the above in a bash script so cwdaemon can be started easily.