PR-1 Portable 12V Rotor

[Puyallup Lee]

Back on Aug. 13 I posted on the Super Antenna YP-3 Yagi thread that I was going to go to Portland, OR to look at a "Yagi in a Bag", a collapsible tower and a PR-1 Portable Rotor.

Since then Moleculo and I have been exchanging PM's and discussing the PR-1 Rotor. We have duscussed cutting and pasting our exchanges into one of the threads so you can see what we discussed.

I saw the listing on the Portland Craigslist and contact Morris, the gentleman who had the antenna and rotor for sale. This was in mid week and Morris said he had some medical problems and would prefer we come down Sunday.

We live in Puyallup, WA just outside of Tacoma and Sunday arrived with the forcast of temps in the low 90's. What a better day to go on a road trip in an airconditioned car. My wife, dog and myself left for Portland about 2 in the afternoon. I should have known better to travel Sunday afternoon, the traffic was terrible. What should have taken us 2 1/2 hours took us a little over 3 hours.

When we crossed the bridge from Washington State into Portland, Oregon we turned off the freeway and followed the Colombia River. Morris lives in a house boat on the Colombia River. I called Morris and told his I had turned off the freeway. He gave me directions to his shop and when we pulled up, he was waiting for us.

As I walked into his shop, WOW!!! There were all these little 12V rotors laying around in different stages of assembly. Some of them were rotors and control boxes that looked like the ones shown on Super Antenna website, then there were others that had been redesigned with a different look.

Morris was just finishing up building me a new rotor. He found out that the rotor he had intended to sell me was rusted inside, from use around the salt water, so he just built me a new one.

I really enjoyed talking with Morris about what is happening with Super Antenna and the litigation, also what his future plans are.

 

[Moleculo]

So are there any chances that more of those 12V rotators can be made available?

 

[Puyallup Lee]

Moleculo, I wish you would have been with me. The shop looked like the typical designers shop. Morris had just finished building some prototypes of the 12V rotor for the Military, he said they had to be able to work on either 12V or 24V.

Vern of Superantenna and Morris designed the little rotors together and Morris built the prototypes. It looks like Morris has been working on upgrades and the new control boxes have been redesigned and look very different from the one pictured on the Superantenna website.

He said that he is thinking of putting several of the prototype rotors on ebay just to get rid of them. I do not know if these are earlier prototypes or later prototypes and I do not know how many he is intending on selling.

I asked if I could offer them to the members of the Worldwidedx website before he put them on ebay, and he gave me permission. If you are interested, you will have to deal with Morris directly, I can not be a middleman.

 

[Moleculo]

I saw these rotators in action a couple of years ago at Dayton and they are really sweet. They would work great for horizontal dipoles or light weight beams.

In my situation in the middle of the city in the Los Angeles area, I don't have a good way to put up a permanent tower with a full time rotator and yagi (partly because the wife says so, but logistics is a real problem, too). I think something like these little rotators would work great for a temporary yagi that you want to put up in your back yard and then take down with you for portable use. I look forward to getting my hands on one.

 

[Puyallup Lee]

We had our club picnic today and I demostrated the rotor for the club members. I think I had more interest in the "Beam in a Bag" although several were interested in the rotor. The radio officer of the club wants to borrow the setup to work Meteor shower. That ought to be a lot of fun.

One of the XYL's took a video with her phone and said she would send it to me by email. We will see how it turns out, there was a lot of background noise, we will see.

If it doesn't work out, I will find someone with a movie camers to do the demostration.

Later

Lee