I Scored some Antennas Today

ToddDubya

NES Member
Joined
Dec 14, 2011
Messages
25,454
Likes
42,753
Location
Berkshires
Feedback: 18 / 0 / 0
A friend of mine hooked me up with a couple beam antennas today, and parts for repair/building new ones. He's the guy with "the van", you know the type. One is a 5 element 2m yagi and the other is a 10 element 70cm yagi. The 2m was in a fight with a tree branch driving down the road (yup, "the van" guy) at some point and needs some work, but the 70cm looks ready to go. He put N-type connectors on them but I think I'll swap those out for SO-239s since that's what I use for everything.

The parts he gave me include a bunch of 6' brazing rods, isolators, keepers, etc. I'll need one rod to fix the broken yagi, but I gotta come up with some ideas for some of the others. I want something for 6m but they're not long enough for that. I probably should have counted them but I'd say there are maybe 6 or 8. Any ideas?

I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with these things. Moonbounce would be cool, but I don't think either is enough on its own. They both fit in my Lesbaru, to give you a feel for the length (heh). Maybe I can listen, though.
 
Well I put an SO-239 connector on the 70cm antenna, dialed it up for 432.100 MHz, and pointed it at the moon. Didn't hear any moon men. I did hear a wicked strong tone at 432.000 MHz that seemed to be affected by cars passing by. Seemed strongest pointed at my neighbor's house, so maybe just some electronics.

For grins I aimed it at the moon and threw out my call sign hoping for an echo. No luck. I wouldn't say my setup was terribly accurate, just the antenna clamped to a pipe and held as still as I could. I also only have 20W output on this band.

I could kind of hear something at 432.100 pointed south-ish. That's the SSB calling frequency. Maybe this weekend I can get somewhere better than my backyard to give it another go.
 
Read up on moonbounce; for starters
info on ERP out of the transmitting antenna,
but even more importantly, the necessary sensitivity of the receiving system.
For all I know, they may measure that in degrees Kelvin or some exotic thing like that.
After all, they put receiver preamps out by the antenna...
 
Yeah, I have been reading up on it and I knew it had close to 0% chance of working but I had a new antenna, a beautiful night, and nothing to do. Peons use weak signal digital modes and stable mounts that can pan and tilt to stay oriented correctly.
 
Yesterday the donor of the antennas and I talked on 70cm basically just blasting through houses, over a couple of hills. I had mine about 15' up, his was sitting on sawhorses, 22 elements between the two of us. We had a perfectly acceptable conversation on FM down to 2w apiece with room to spare. I would have guessed it was farther, but google tells me we're 6 miles apart. He was using an HT so we couldn't try SSB, but I imagine we could have done much better if we had.

Next up I have to fix the 2m yagi and get that back into service.
 
Back
Top Bottom