I don't think it was static. I was standing on a dry wooden ladder. There is a spark gap across the base insulator to take care of static and lightning. Also, at one site they had an FM antenna on the AM tower, so the stub feed put the tower at DC ground.
I believe that the insulation was the dielectric, the tool metal one part of the capacitor, and my hand the other part. My 300 pound, 60% water mass was probably detuning the antenna system slightly. It was a repeatable and sustainable arc. Almost changed my mind about climbing it the first time. The regular tower crew would just stand on the elevated concrete base and jump onto the tower, but they were a lot braver (dumber?) than me. One of the station managers was a college buddy of mine. Their AM non-directional was daytime-only. I got permission to use the tower during the 160 Meter Contest. The local contesters met me at the transmitter. After sundown shut down, we unhooked the antenna at the doghouse and connected RG-8 to the tower. Ran the coax back to the transmitter building. They operated until dawn, but had to reconnect everything before start-of-day broadcast. The 300 foot tower was a bit difficult to tune, but the 180 radials definitely helped make a nice signal. The guys would set up a Beverage antenna next time for receive; that big vertical picked up everything. Mike - AA8K wrote: > Could that be static electricity? > When I used have to climb hot AM towers, I would set up a wooden stepladder to get me above the base insulator. Then I would use my insulated diagonal cutter to touch the tower before I grabbed on. I always drew an arc just before it touched the tower. That's only at 1 Mhz. _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com
