First Year Moon Bounce.

 My first full year of moon bounce has been to say the least interesting.   

Firstly at the beginning of the year, during storm Dennis,  the stub mast snapped resulting in the array hanging precariously by the bottom of the spid rotator on the remains of the stub.   This resulted in me running for most of the year on a partial array due to not being able to have anyone fix the system due to Covid restrictions. 

Secondly I have been having transceiver issues with the K3s and again due to Covid getting this resolved has been a long drawn out affair.  In fact the rig has just been sent back to the dealer as it will no longer key the sequencer ho hum.  

The new Gemini 2 1.2k amplifier has however worked faultlessly so there's something to be happy about.   

So for 2020 I managed to work 62 unique stations,  15 DXCC and 36 squares.   

The limiting factors to my system are now antenna size and there's nothing I can do about that other than move and that isn't going to happen and general noise level. 

I did under stack the array when it went back up to see if it would help with the noise which it didn't so next year if I can find the people to do I may be able to gain a couple of dB back in gain.  

Anyway tnxs to all those who I managed to work this year. 

Date Time         Callsign Locator Country

-----         ----         -------- ------- -------

04/01 15:17 IK2DDR JN55GN Italy

04/01 16:19 I2MEK JN55SJ Italy

04/01 21:45 RX1AS KO59XW Russia

06/01 21:51 UR3EE KN88DC Ukraine

09/01 20:57 S52LM JN65TX Slovenia

09/01 22:18 WA1NPZ FN43BK United States

31/01 13:56 RW6HM LN14SF Russia

08/02 20:07 I2FAK JN45OB Italy

08/02 21:32 RW3QJA KO90PH Russia

08/02 21:58 SV6KRW KM09KP Greece

08/02 22:10 OK1UGA JO80CF Czech Republic

08/02 22:24 S51ZO JN86DR Slovenia

08/02 22:32 OK1NI JO70OQ Czech Republic

08/02 22:40 R3PA KO93JV Russia

08/02 23:26 PA5Y JO21VO Netherlands

06/03 21:44 IK4WLV JN54XK Italy

06/03 22:58 RX1AS KO59XW Russia

08/03 22:03 S51ZO JN86DR Slovenia

08/03 22:40 IK4WLV JN54XK Italy

08/03 22:48 IK2DDR JN55GN Italy

10/03 00:06 HA6NQ JN98WA Hungary

03/04 20:02 IK4WLV JN54XK Italy

03/04 20:22 PA9RX JO32BW Netherlands

04/04 19:34 I3MEK JN55SJ Italy

04/04 19:40 IK4WLV JN54XK Italy

04/04 19:59 ON4AOI JO21BA Belgium

04/04 20:45 RU3GX KO92SO Russia

28/04 14:34 IK2DDR JN55GN Italy

28/04 14:54 F6HVK JN27LH France

28/04 15:46 S52LM JN65TX Slovenia

29/05 20:44 HA6NQ JN98WA Hungary

30/05 16:14 IK7EZN JN90DG Italy

30/05 16:57 I2FAK JN45OB Italy

30/05 18:58 LZ2FO KN13KX Bulgaria

30/05 19:25 WA1NPZ FN43BK United States

30/05 21:45 KU8Y EN61UW United States

31/05 18:17 EB5EEO IM98PG Spain

31/05 20:31 UR3EE KN88DC Ukraine

01/06 18:38 S51LM JN65TX Slovenia

01/06 19:00 F6HVK JN27LH France

01/06 19:16 IW4ARD JN64FD Italy

01/06 20:58 ES3RF KO29IF Estonia

19/07 16:33 I3MEK JN55SJ Italy

19/07 16:58 K5QE EM31CJ United States

22/07 14:03 UX5UL KO50FL Ukraine

22/07 14:47 IW4ARD JN64FD Italy

22/07 18:11 W7OJT DM24UL United States

23/07 15:41 AA5C EM13SE United States

24/07 17:40 EA5CJ IM99PL Spain

25/07 15:23 F4DJK JN15AI France

25/07 15:37 I2RV JN45PL Italy

28/07 20:24 IK4WLV JN54XK Italy

14/08 10:32 RK3FG KO86HP Russia

20/08 14:07 DK3WG JO71GI Germany

13/09 13:28 KE7NR/P DM54AH United States

16/09 13:57 LZ2FO KN13KX Bulgaria

19/09 14:37 IK1UWL JN33VT Italy

19/09 14:44 RX1AS KO59XW Russia

29/11 21:41 RX1AS KO59XW Russia

29/11 21:49 PA5Y JO21VO Netherlands

29/11 21:56 OK1DIX JN79HT Czech Republic

02/12 21:48 IK4WLV JN54XK Italy  

23cm on two Watts and a prayer

A few month back one of the members of my radio club posted to the clubs group.io group that he had participated in the April 23cm UKAC using a his new IC9700 and a tri-band vertical and managed three OSO's.    

His foray into the world of 23cm's had me dusting off my SG-Labs 23cm transverter I had bought a few years previous and had sat on the shelf and actually give it a whirl. 

The transverter is the MKII version and has a power output of 2.5W so real QRP compared to the IC9700's 10W.  The only antenna I had was a similar tri-band (Comet GP-95N) with a gain of 12.8dBi if you believe that?  The feeder was 15m of Ecoflex 10 so feed losses were going to be around 2.47dB.   So all things considered ERP would be around 16.5W.    

Using an FT817 with the above setup I entered my first 23cm UKAC and was amazed to work 7 stations with the best DX being G3MEH at 105km.  

I can't remember now if I used the ON4KST microwave chat during the first contest but I believe I didn't but with all subsequent contests I did.  

Anyway I was actually amazed I did so well with such low power and polarisation mismatch but that one contest had given me the incentive to do the next contest.

For the June contest I made the easiest change I could and bought an 18 element Yagi a  PA1296-18-1.5RB from Antenna Amplifier in Serbia.  The antenna gives a reported gain of 17.16dBi this of course gave me an increase in ERP from 16.5W to 45W which should give me improvement of around half an S-point and of course the 30dB improvement from having no polarisation mismatch. 

You can see from the table below there has been a steady improvement in points and DX though in August there was some great tropo as shown by the fact I worked OZ1FF on 2W though it was mainly sea path but neither the less I was extremely happy.

Month	QSO's	Points	DX Km
May	7	1877	105
June	11	2154	105
July	11	3070	180
August	11	3624	208
September	19	8357	670

So the next easy upgrade will be replacing the current feed cable with Ultraflex 13 but that will only yield another dB but it will be in place for the October contest.   

Next up will be finishing off the 80W amplifier I'm building and sticking it in a box.     The finished unit will have a LPF by John G3XDY, a 80W PA based up John G4BAO well known design with a homebrew controller to switch the pa and tvrx while also displaying output power, temp and VSWR. 

BG7TBL FA-2 Frequency Counter Review

I’ve recently been playing around with creating my own GPSDO based upon an Arduino and Si5351a synthesiser and needed away to check the accuracy and all had to hand was a rather old Racal 9001 6 digit counter which wasn’t cutting the mustard.

A friend of mine recommended a BG7TBL FA-2 with a precision of 11 digits/second at 10MHz which can be bought from eBay for around £100 pounds including postage which is a lot cheaper than buying an older Racal 1998 10 digit counter which go for silly money.

For your £100 you get the following:

1. Two channels one for measuring between 1Hz - 200MHz and the other between 200MHz and 6GHz.
2. A sensitivity between 20dBm to -20dBm.
3. 0.1, 1 and 10 second gate times.
4. A frequency resolution at 10MHz of 0.001Hz with a 0.1/s gate, 0.0001Hz with a  1/s gate and 0.00001Hz with a 10/s gate.
5. Switchable input impedance on CH1 between 50 and 1M ohms.
6. 150kHz switchable LPF on CH1.
7. 10MHz internal OCXO frequency standard with 0.5Hz/yr ageing.
8. RF power meter able to measure between 20dBm to -50dBm.
9. 10MHz frequency standard at 4dBm.
10. 10MHz external frequency standard.
11. USB serial interface.
12. 12 Vdc PSU.

In the above picture of the front panel you can see its very simplistic consisting of three push and the two channel sockets.  

The mode button lets you switch between channels and whether or not to display averaging.  Gate allows to you to select one of the three gate options.  RST allows you to reset the averaging when displayed.

Some buttons operate in tandem with another to select additional options such as RST+GATE to turn the LPF on and off, RST+MODE switch between input impedances on CH1.

The rear panel has the 10MHz reference input and outputs, USB interface, DC power socket an on / off switch and access to an internal trimmer to adjust the internal OCXO.

To test the unit I used a LeoBodnar single output GPSDO locked to six satellites with a SNR greater than 40dB and set to 10MHz at -3dBm.

The Bodnar has a stated accuracy of 1ppb (parts per billion).  At 10MHz a we should should see a deviation of +/- 0.01Hz.

I wrote a piece of Python code to log the data from the USB serial interface and saved the data to CSV which I then processed again using Python and the matplotlib graphing library you can grab the code from https://github.com/M0WGF/RadioOddsAndSods

Both the FA-2 and GPSDO were kept at a fairly constant temperature of 18 degrees C for three hours before the test began.

On the FA-2 channel one was selected with the input set an impedance of 50 ohms, the LPF switched off and a 1/s gate time.

With the GPSDO connected and locked I switched the FA-2 on and started logging and to be honest went off for a cuppa thinking it would take awhile to stabilise and as you can see from the following chart that wasn’t at all the case.

You can see in the first five minutes there’s a rapid decrease before dipping below and returning to 10MHz as the OCXO heats up.  The first data point being taken at 16:37.

Below we zoom in just before the frequency dip.

As you can see the measured frequency at this scale is near as dammit spot on within thirteen minutes of switching the unit.

Next lets zoom in further and see how the stability looks in much finer detail.

As you can see the readings from the FA-2 are well within the +/- 0.01Hz measurement we were expecting from the Bodnar GPSDO.  

I would have liked to be able to check the accuracy in the GHz range but sadly I don’t possess an accurate signal source at those frequencies.

All in all I think for £100 unit from eBay it’s performance is excellent so if you’re in need of a cheap frequency counter the FA-2 seems to be a bit of a bargain.

QO-100 VFO display for Elecraft K3s and Yaesu FT817

I've been using SDR-Console to listen to QO100 and now I've almost completed my uplink equipment I want some way of seeing what the uplink frequency should be when tuned to a particular downlink one so I knocked up a quick Python script to show me what the uplink and downlink frequency would be when tuning my Elecraft K3s or FT817.

To use it you'll need Python 3 with PyQt5 and PySerial installed.   

Edit the config.ini and set the LO in Hertz which in my case was my 70cm so 432000000

Example:

[CONFIG] LO = 432000000 PORT = COM10 BAUD = 38400 POLL = 0.01 RIG = K3S

To start the application from the command line do. 

python QO100uplinkVFO.py

If that'll be useful you can download the software from GitHub.

   

Your stations crap why can't you hear me?

When I moved to the Isle of Sheppey radio gaining my amateur radio licence wasn't on my mind I was doing some radio astronomy taking hydrogen line measurements of the milkyway so I didn't buy a property with the idea of operating a VHF/UHF station from it.

I've had a number of comments in the 2m UKAC with why can't you hear me? Your station is crap.

Well there's a couple of reasons.

1. The noise floor at this location is around -125dBm all year round and in fact in winter is can be even higher.
2. The tropology of the location.

Well number is primary worse than it was due to stacking the antennas and I still need to get someone up on the mast to understack the array for me.    

Number two however is obviously nothing I can change short of moving house and I'm not doing that.    

My QTH is around 40m above sea level and to boot I live on the side of a hill, consequently in certain directions I have a great take off and in others I might as well unplug the antenna and use a wet piece of string. 

Anyway to show the issue I've taken some tropology profiles which hopefully should show why if you live towards the East of my location I have such trouble in hearing you. 😀

North

45 Degrees

East

135 Degrees

South

225 Degrees

West

315 Degrees

You can see the take off in all directions on the HeyWhatsThat website.

Squares, squares, squares 2019

Well the squares are in for 2019 I had quite a big improvement on 2m and sadly a slightly worse on 70cm oh well hopefully the new 70cm amplifier will give an improvement.

For 2018 I managed 86 squares on 2m and for 2019 I've managed a massive improvement of 150 squares.

2m Squares 2019

On 70cm in 2018 I managed 25 squares while this year I only managed 24 which is a pity but then I still have an issue with my 70cm setup in that it's semi-permanent.

70cm Squares 2019 

Here's a link to last years squares round up.