| EME on 70mhz, A WORLD FIRST..! | ||
| Following tests carried out by Robert GD4GNH and myself back in 2006, I finally found a suitable station to try EME with on the 4m band. | ||
| Willem ZS6WAB and I
tried an EME sked on Friday evening, the13th. Being the 13th I should have
guessed something would go wrong, the masthead TX/RX relay failed due to
water ingress. There wasn't any leaks or damp in the main plastic box so
I've no idea where the water came from, weird or what. Our 2nd try was the morning of the 15th, my moon was up at 00:38 and we started from that point and I sat there for almost an hour watching as nothing happened! Not even an echo at the end of each of my transmit periods. Was the moon to far south now, had I missed that 'sweet spot' I'd found back in 2006? Then, at 01:34 I received my first tail end echo. The screen shot below is SpecJT from within WSJT and shows a waterfall screen rolling downwards with the end of my TX period shown by a white splash about 2cm wide in the top 3/4 of the screen. Just above and to the right of that there is a clear EME echo indicated by a small vertical white line. Things were starting to look somewhat better now. |
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| With that, the next period I received the following, there's two screens in this one. The SpecJT screen and the main WSJT screen : | ||
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| This screen shot above
was taken after receiving Willems 'calls & report' message and I had sent my
RO report back. Those with a keen eye will have spotted Willems reply to my
RO within the SpecJT screen. What follows is the next logical step with WSJT
on EME The screen shot below shows Willems response to my RO report. I had just finished sending a period of 73 that was in reply to his RRRs In turn, Willems 73 can (just) be seen in the waterfall of SpecJT. Once again i copied a short ECHO of my own signal, just like earlier. |
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And the QSO was complete. |
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| Although i do not have a screen shot of the QSO from ZS, i do have the following shot from the day before, as you can see, not much of a signal received with Willem, but... WSJT managed to decode my QRP EME signal. Before anyone points out the moon position, Willem has taken the screen dump some time after the tests, when his moon has set. | ||
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| This QSO was carried out using 160w to TWO eight element long boom Eagle yagis vertically stacked about 16 to 18 feet apart with the bottom antenna about 40 foot above ground. TX feeder is LDF4-50 and RX is RG213. The radio is an un-modified FT847 and there is a LNA pre-amp at the antenna. (http://www.lnatechnology.com/) |