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Reviews For: Glen Martin Hazer system

Category: Towers, masts, accessories, climbing & safety gear

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Review Summary For : Glen Martin Hazer system
Reviews: 23MSRP: $389
Description:
wench operated tower tram system for raising and lowering antennas without having to climb the tower
Product is in production
More Info: http://
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
00233.2
KC0GOX Rating: 2004-08-10
Gives good service with a little work... Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I have been using a Glen Martin H-4 Hazer for the Rohn 25g for about five years now, and it has given solid service.I must say at the outset that Glen Martin's advertising is a bit optimistic, and the "never climb again" is hyped just a little too much. This is one of those good product ideas that works very well within its parameters. However, my experience is to expect to do some tower climbing, along with some minor "fit and trim" to make this thing work correctly. The reason? I have noticed that Rohn 25g tower has some variance between sections, and sometimes you have to do a little "hammer adjusting" to get things to work satisfactorily. This is not a criticism of either the hazer or the tower; such manufacturing tolerance is necessary in order to make these things to where common folks can afford them.
That said, the hazer tram does make it much easier to put up AND KEEP WORKING a nice antenna system, especially for HF frequencies. If your antennas are carefully chosen the hazer can also be used with great success for V/UHF antennas as well. Keep in mind that certain antennas work better than others because of element spacing and tower clearance issues.
If your antenna plans do not call for designs that are incompatable with the hazer, you are not going higher than 50 feet, and you don't mind doing a little work and fitting, then you will be well satisfied with the hazer. If you are the impatient type that expects to put things together once and get frustrated if adjustments are necessary, then I would say for you to avoid the hazer.
WB2FKO Rating: 2004-05-05
good idea, poor quality Time Owned: 6 to 12 months.
I've had a Hazer H-3 for about 8 months now and decided it was about time I reported on my experience.

The concept is great. The quality and quality control at GME are terrible. Here are the problems I had:

1) The accompanying booklet is more like 'clues to a puzzle' than assembly instructions. After spending several hours trying to figure it out without success, I asked a ham friend to come over and have a look. The problem area was the rotor platform. Between the two of us, we eventually came up with a plan to attach it and assemble the Hazer.

2) To get the thing together, we had to do some additional drilling and filing. Again, the difficulty was with the platform and it appears they shipped parts from perhaps two different models that would not fit together.

3) The lanyard that is used to pull down the locking latch is so cheap it's silly - it's a piece of twine. If that breaks, you have to climb. I replaced their lanyard with a metal cable and a loop anchor system.

4) The biggest nightmare was the optional (and expensive) caster wheels that are supposed to allow for easy sliding up and down the tower. Mine had the opposite effect. The bracket bolts also serve as axles for the wheels. When you tighten the wheel brackets to the Hazer, the wheels bind solid and do not turn. The only way we could make this work was to loosen the brackets to the point that the wheels only skimmed over the tower legs. This worked marginally, but the tower was still a chore to raise and lower.

Disaster occured during a lowering attempt this spring. The Hazer with my light VHF array on board got stuck at a very slightly off-parallel section of the tower, about halfway up. The lowering cable went a little slack and jumped off the pulley at the top of the tower -- 40 feet off the ground. When I finally realized what had happened, the cable had wedged between the wheel and pulley housing. The Hazer would not go up or down. The added complication was that the guy wires were tied to the Hazer. So now I had an unguyed tower with a stuck antenna array on it.

I eventually managed to remove the pulley from the top of the tower. This involved attaching temporary rope guys at the 30 foot level and many hazardous climbs over the stuck Hazer and through the antenna elements. There are no footholds on the Hazer so I literally had to pull myself over it by grabbing the tower and using my upper body strength. Yes, I was very scared.

The supplied pulley is another cheap toy - it is made of ALUMINUM(!) with only a very shallow groove. I can't believe I didn't replace this immediately when I first saw it but I naively trusted the manufacturer. A steel, deep groove, roller bearing pulley from a surplus store replaced the dead pulley, which will serve as an interesting conversation piece for years to come. I also discarded the caster wheels, which got me into so much trouble in the first place.

I know the idea has been around for decades and a lot of people are happy with the GME Hazer. I am not one of them. There are various knockoffs of the Hazer being sold and I would recommend trying one of those instead.
W3CK Rating: 2003-05-10
ok but needs improvement Time Owned: 6 to 12 months.
The product is fine overall but there are problems: 1)the release/safety latch used to lower the hazer is not very strong it consists of a thin "S" hook which bent and caused the cable I had attached to disconnect from the hook. This required me to climb the tower and release the latch by hand to lower the hazer.I removed the hook and attached cable directly to the latch. This release latch system should be alot better for the money.2) The instructions are not very good you have to do alot of reading between the lines. 3)I had a problem with the pully. The pully cable got off the track and got stuck. Had to take the tower back down and replace the pully. The pully they supply is not very well made. I bought a much better one for $4.00. Their's was pretty cheap.3) I got no pully cable had to buy my own.4) I bought a tower/Hazer package they ship all parts in little plastic bags which are fine but they lable the bags with part numbers with a marker or" greese pencil" and the ink easily rubs off the bags. Most of the part numbers were rubbed off. This requires you to guess which bag contains which part during assembly. 5) I received the wrong top tower section and had to remove a part, drill holes and call them for the pully.6) They give you a device to connect to the tower to which guy wires attach. The problem is this device is mounted on the corner of the tower over the same place the Hazer rides up and down on. I put the guy brackets at the top of my 30 foot tower and the hazer does not go up that high which is ok for me. But this is a problem if you have a tower 40 feet or higher which must be guyed somewhere in between the top and the ground because the Hazer can't go up and down over these brackets. Conclusion: Overall not a bad product but for the money they charge they need to pay more attention to detail.