Cathy and I are building a new house about two miles outside of Ellisville, MS in the Bridgewater subdivision and will be moving around the middle of April. The Pine Belt DX Association met up at my house on Saturday, March 17, 2007 to take down my antennas and tower. It was a really good day for tower work, albeit the temperature was a little cool early that morning with temperatures in the upper 30's. It got up into the middle 60's with some wind gusts at times. I think everyone got more sun than they realized, though.

Lee Matthews, KB5IXI, was the tower man. I assisted him some on the tower. The ground team consisted of Tom Williams, N5TNT; James Cook, KC5ZIW; Frank Barrett, N5KKG; Mike McCraw, W5MR; Buddy Howard, K5MCW; and Basil Smith, KD5UJH; and our BIG helper, Blake Barrett.

I have a new GP-81 Gin Pole Kit from W9IIX with a 12 foot long piece of 6061-T6 Aluminum tubing with 1/4 inch walls. This is aircraft grade aluminum tubing and it really worked well. I bought this before we took down N5NQ's tower last Labor Day weekend. We also used a Heavy Duty Combo Tower Jack/Leg Aligner. We used the tower jack on every section. We all accussed Mark Brown, N5NQ, of putting "Lock Tight" between each section when we put the tower up. It really burned up a lot of time having to pry each section apart on the tower.

Everyone gathered a little after eight that morning and Lee and I went up the tower about 9:30 a.m. Lee and I got all the dipoles off the tower first and then we started on the Force 12 XR5. The Force 12 came down easier than we expected it to and probably came down quicker than Mark's Mosley did back in September. It rode the guy wires down to the front of the house and they had a little bit of a time turning it and getting it down but overall it came down easily. It took a lot of prying with the tower jack to get the short section off. But we got it and two other sections off before we broke for lunch around 1:20 p.m. We all went to Arby's and ate lunch. It felt great to be off of the tower for a while. We got cranked back up about 2:30 p.m. and finished policing everything up a little before five. The prying of each section with the tower jack really took a lot of extra time.

It was a lot of work getting the tower down but all in all it was a fun day and most importantly a safe day without any injuries. As always, a HUGE THANKS goes out to Lee Matthews, KB5IXI, for his tireless work on the tower and to the rest of the ground crew for helping get my tower down.

We do not know when the tower party will be to go back up, but this is a great team and they do a good job. Everyone had a good time talking and visiting even though it was a hard day's work.