My ‘new’ HF aerial – A SteppIR UrbanBeam

This post has been a long time coming, regular readers may remember that back in March 2023 I made a comment that I’d decided what aerial I was going to buy and then I posted in April 2023 to say that I’d had deliveries but I’ve barely mentioned it since.

As per the printed sheets which came with the aerial, I downloaded the latest version of the assembly instructions and started building. I had noticed I was missing some parts so I contacted the supplier who was able to send them to me.

I completed the two element housing units (EHUs) and fitted them to the boom indoors and then it was time to schedule the assembly of the rest of the aerial.

The first thing was to lower the mast, remove the Hexbeam and fit the NN4ZZ tilt plate, this was done in the middle of July 2023 and then a week later, my brother came to help me do the rest of the work. We scheduled an entire weekend for this as it would involve removing my existing coax, replacing it with a run of new Hyperflex 10, building the rest of the aerial, mounting it to the mast and raising it back up.

This was where the problems started. The instructions I’d got didn’t quite seem to match up with all the parts. We got as far as we could and simply had to abort the work. There followed a long email conversation with me and SteppIR regarding construction and it became clear that the design had changed slightly between the version of the aerial I’d bought, and the instructions I’d downloaded. The exact build procedure was clarified and three weeks later, we tried again.

This time we were successful, the aerial build was completed and finally we managed to get it installed on the mast and raised into the air.

Here it is on the day it went up, the 19th August 2023.

Initial testing appeared to be good but within a couple of hours, it became clear that things weren’t quite right. I started getting some errors on the controller screen suggesting that there were issues with the controller cable.

Resolving this became quite a complicated affair involving a lot of testing, checking, retesting, rechecking. I remade all the terminations and replaced all the connectors but the error still persisted, albeit intermittently. I bought a SteppIRtest ONE to simplify testing and that really made things easier.

I also discovered that there was a fault on one of the EHUs that had been there since the beginning and so that unit was replaced under warranty by SteppIR. You can hear what the problem was by watching this video.

It was determined that this faulty EHU had blown some driver chips in the controller so again, these were replaced under warranty by SteppIR and my supplier. However, I was still intermittently getting the same error message I’ve posted above.

My work around for this was to only have the controller plugged in and switched on when I needed to adjust the aerial. In practise this was a pain because each time I wanted to change band, or even just retune within the same band, I’d need to plug the controller into the mains, switch it on, make the change, switch it off and then unplug it. It became quite a chore and although it avoided any more driver chip issues, I wasn’t happy with it.

I decided to swap the cable again between the junction box and the EHU. I’d already done this once but I’d used the same cable that was originally supplied. I bought some different cable and my brother came along to help again at the end of August 2024. The cable I’d bought was eight core so we decided to double up on each connection.

I’m very pleased to say that in the eight months or so since swapping this, I’ve not had any further instances of the error message on the controller or any more driver modules failing. I can only assume that there was a fault on the original cable that caused this and that fault must have been on the whole length of the cable because I’d already swapped it once.

It took a long time and a lot of work to finally get a fully working aerial. I can now leave the controller all plugged in and switched on with no fear of the fault reoccurring. I’ve used the aerial successfully for a number of contests and can easily run full power for extended periods with no issues whatsoever.

And I think it looks quite good too.