May 1st, 2012

After mounting the dish last evening, I was very impatient to see how it works. So I installed the controls for the rotator, fixed some meters of ECOFLEX 15 cable in the morning and started checking the beacons on 23 and 13 cm. It was no surprise but very satisfying that all of them were much stronger compared to the old 1.2 m dish. In the afternoon I had the initial QSO with the new antenna on 23 cm with Giorgio, IK3GHY in JN65DM. As I now know, I only had 5 W but Giorgio heard me with 539 anyway. My report for him was 559 and at the end of the QSO I could copy him in SSB too. Later I had a sked with 9A1Z in JN86DL. The signals weren’t strong enough to complete a QSO but we were able to detect them in the noise. So we will have another attempt when the preamp will be installed and my linear is finished.