[amsat-bb] AO40 My 60cm dish experiments

[John Wright <g4dmf@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Last night 19th July, I had a good pass of AO40, I tried my 21 turn helix, 
I could here it, just, with the aerial in the shack!
So I tried it outside, mounted on my Black and Decker Workmate, even 
better, so I thought what the hell, get the dish feed out I had been 
playing with. Well, I was gob-smacked ( a bit surprised ). The transponder 
was like tuning across 2 metres in a lift! the beacon was S 7, my noise 
floor is about S 1, I heard stations from all over Europe, some peaking S 
6, many copied down to S 2. I was very surprised at the difference between 
a 21 turn helix and the 60cm offset dish. I have taken a few photo's and 
put them up on my site at the link below. I copied over 1000 CRC OK 
telemetry blocks before I had to pack up, I hav'nt got uplink  aerials yet, 
so I thought that I might as well collect telemetry. I posted the blocks 
off to the archive.
At range 48,000 Km and squint 16.1 deg, the beacon was S 4.5
I was still getting 100% telemetry at 54400 Km and squint 21.5

There was a large number of carriers tuning up on the beacon frequency, and 
one station actually called CQ on the beacon frequency. All lost blocks of 
telemetry were due to me tweaking things, or the previously mentioned tuning up

A request.... Please check you uplink freq BEFORE transmitting, I notice 
that a number of uplink charts have been posted, so please use them.

Have a look at my efforts, any comments whichever way are welcome

http://www.g4dmf.co.uk/dish/antenna.html


____________________________

      G4DMF  QTHR   IO93ha
      Amsat-UK Member 5372
          g4dmf@amsat.org
        g4dmf@g4dmf.co.uk
      http://www.g4dmf.co.uk
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