What did you do in the shack today?

[ToddDubya]

I've definitely not been eyeing the dish dangling off the side of a house in my neighborhood.

 

[ToddDubya]

Boom, I just made my first 33cm contact, almost exactly 7 miles apart with at least one hill in between. He has a proper yagi and 50w and I was using a PCB log periodic about 4" above tabletop level, in the house, running maybe 800mW from a 144 to 903 transverter.

CW was easy. He gave me 579, I gave him 599. On SSB I could hear him pretty well but he could only tell I was transmitting, not what I was saying.

It's safe to say his antenna was doing the bulk of the heavy lifting.

Next up I'd like to get up to a higher vantage point with a clear shot from farther away.

 

[n1oty]

Boom, I just made my first 33cm contact, almost exactly 7 miles apart with at least one hill in between. He has a proper yagi and 50w and I was using a PCB log periodic about 4" above tabletop level, in the house, running maybe 800mW from a 144 to 903 transverter.

CW was easy. He gave me 579, I gave him 599. On SSB I could hear him pretty well but he could only tell I was transmitting, not what I was saying.

It's safe to say his antenna was doing the bulk of the heavy lifting.

Next up I'd like to get up to a higher vantage point with a clear shot from farther away.

If you are going to play that far up in frequency, use low loss coax/fittings and keep your runs as short as possible.

 

[ToddDubya]

If you are going to play that far up in frequency, use low loss coax/fittings and keep your runs as short as possible.

Yeah, for sure. This had maybe 12" of coax to the transverter, then 6" of that low loss rigid coax to the antenna, which is why it was only 4" above table level. When my friend was using this transverter he was primarily/exclusively roving, so he must have been using something else from the transverter to the antenna, but I'm not sure what. There was a dish involved too, but I think that was for even higher frequency stuff.

We were talking last night about building something better (yagi) if this setup worked. He's been doing microwave stuff a long time so he'll steer me in the right direction.