12/02/2007 | K2DH This year's competition marked my return, after five long years, to EME. I spent my summer getting the dish built and operational, and had it running pretty well before the contest. My original plan was to have several bands (23, 13, and 9cm) running so that I could participate in all three weekends, but work and family commitments didn't leave me enough time to get 2304 and 3456 ready, so I was only operational on 23cm for the second two weekends. As I've learned to expect, Murphy was sitting right next to me in the shack pretty much all the time the moon was up. The first weekend, I was on when the moon came up and things played pretty well on Friday night- my transmit power is fairly low, at about 180W, but my echoes were pretty good and I was getting good reports from the stations I worked. I put in about 4 hours that night, and planned to get up in time for the Asian window, but set my alarm clock wrong and woke up to bright sunshine and moonset. With a family commitment Saturday, I couldn't get on in the evening, but got on before moonset Sunday and had a nice SSB QSO with my friend Steve KB8VAO operating N9JIM/6 at the Jamesburg Dish, then a couple more CW QSO's as the moon went into the trees.
The second weekend I planned to have my high power (500W) amp running but that plan failed so I worked feverishly to get the 180W (which, when throttled back also serves as the driver for the big amp) back online. Well, there was Murphy- I couldn't get 10W out of the amp, messing with it all day. Finally, I spent a little more time at the last minute with it and got it to play again (don't know what I fixed, but it's working) in time for my sked with Al Katz at P43L. There were many, many stations on 1296 that night- it really did sound like the low end of 20m. So, I worked as many as I could- had great visual moon so I tracked it with my CCTV camera on the dish and the echoes were very, very good. Some of the stations on 1296 are absolutely bone-crushingly strong- K9SLQ, HB9BBD, K5SO and others pushed the S-meter to S-9. The final night was just as good- many more worked and lots of good signals heard.
I ended up with 50 QSO's and 31 multipliers- not my biggest score in this contest, but a good indicator of how the station will play once all the remaining tasks and tweaks are done and the high power amp is running. The station consists of a 5m solid dish, tracking the moon with a W2DRZ controller and F1EHN software. My LNA is a WD5AGO- about 0.28dB NF, 30dB Gain, and my feed is my own version of a VE4MA "Super Feed", but using a 90 degree hybrid instead of polarizer screws. My transverter is a DEMI and it drives my trusty old N6CA single water-cooled 7289 cavity amp. I have about 1dB of transmit feedline loss. I look forward to next year's event and playing on all bands from 1296-10GHz. -- K2DH