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My other hobby, ham radio
Mary B:
4' offset fiberglass Ku band dishes are dirt cheap, can get one shipped for about $150... haven't found a 6 footer which would be better but I haven't searched hard. Long term project anyway. Need to collect parts, transverter, amplifier (30 watts at 10ghz is EXPENSIVE!), feed, dish, mount, design the az/el parts...
ChrisOlson:
I'm not really into dishes that much myself, nor UHF. I decided to go with the dipoles because they're easier to tilt than a stacked array with like a couple 7 or 9 element yagi's in it, and has way more gain. 6 meters is as high as I go in frequency here - don't even own a 2m radio, nor have any use for one.
I got the idea from the Russian Woodpecker radar arrays that used to come in on 20 and 40 meters back in the late 70's and 80's. The Russian Woodpecker was really the Duga directional radar arrays that operated on shortwave, and they were built totally with driven dipoles fed with ladder line. 10 MW of effective radiated power in the direction the arrays were facing.
Mary B:
Yeah the woodpecker was a great band is open indicator! Annoying but it did tell you what the MUF was! They used to run all the way up to 30mhz at times.
I like VHF+ because I can tinker. I just ordered a noise figure meter for tweaking preamps. Will let me build and sell a few, do some repairs etc. Need to find a noise source for it yet or build one. Lot of small machining etc for preamps that I can do with simple equipment like my drill press. Plus the antennas are small!
Tinkering with HF stuff takes a lot of space for antennas and I don't have it.
madlabs:
Mary, I'm with ya. VHF/UHF is cheap, small and fun to play with. My quad stack of 440 mHz Yagi's is just so darn cute! Cost almost nothing to build and took an afternoon. My buddy has a similar setup and we can chat on a few 10's of mW's. Great for chewing the rag while noodling around on the HF bands. Also love the 2M band for local comms. We have very poor cell coverage but great 2M, either simplex from home or via repeaters. Nice to know the YL can reach out if she needs help or I forget to ask her to get something from town. An between several linked repeater system I can talk to her well out of the area too.
The YL is testing for her General ticket (and I am going for Extra) in a couple of weeks. The we can put a dc to daylight rig in her car!
Jonathan - KK6RPX
tanner0441:
Hi
While we're reminiscing on the Woodpecker another bane in the life of the top band operator was Loran wandering slowly around the top of the band, and I doubt you suffered with them in the US, was the Fishing Trawlers in the north sea who would come down below 2 Mhz if it was a bit noisy where they should have been, with the obligatory flowery language, where everyone was of dubious lineage and intelligence that didn't work for the same company they did.
You were OK in between them though because Power Line Transmitters and switched mode power supplies hadn't been invented, so apart from shot noise from the resistors life was quiet, and transistors were limited to audio and similar frequencies, and did anyone have problems with the 78 series regulators that whistled happily around 60 Mhz.
Happy daze. (not a typo)
Brian.
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