April 24, 2025
All the station improvements paid off this morning. I've been chasing the Galapagos Islands DXpediion of HD8G on 23cm EME for the last few days. It has been slow going, but finally it was Q65-120D to the rescue. Thanks to Bruce, PY2BS the HD8G EME op for his patience and skill.
How I feel put to music!
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| A large part of moon bounce is tenacity! |
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| The Galapagos side of the contact - folding 2.4M dish to folding 2.4M dish. |
April 23, 2025
Now that I have my 23cm EME station back stable and tracking the moon tightly, it is time to see how the AG6EE pre-amp plays. Petr has packaged the pre-amp module, filters, isolation relay and a 50 ohm termination into a single package. A male N connector connects directly to the RX feed port doing away with any short stubs of coax.
Working several stations and shooting some sun noise figures shows me at least a 1.5db receive improvement over my current setup. When we have the next blue bird day here in Montana I'll breakout SpectraVue and do some better science.
When13.8 vdc is supplied to the AG6EE pre-amp it goes into receive mode, remove the DC power and it drops into transmit mode switching the pre-amp's front end into a 50 ohm termination.
When you hear KB2SA and his 1.9M dish in the speaker at -16 you know things are working.
There is nothing wrong with the WD5AGO pre-amps I've been using for many years, but I have to run 2 inches of semi-flex coax ahead of the pre-amp to hook things up. That degrades the noise figure.
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| It's all in one elegant package. |
April 21, 2025
While the slew drive itself functions perfectly, my tripod wasn't up to the task. Things were just too top heavy and unstable with 65 pounds (22 kg) of slew drive sitting at the apex. So I sketched out a drawing of what I needed and went off to visit the local welding/machine shop to throw some steel at the problem.
It turned out quite well, especially after a few coats of green paint. The land I operate from is not my own, so to avoid having to dig and pour a concrete base I drove four 24 inch (61cm) 3/4" (19mm) diameter tent stakes through holes in the base to hold things in place. So far it looks to be a very big improvement over what I had.
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| Steel plate and schedule 40 pipe solve a lot of issues! |
April 7, 2025
All this tariff nonsense made me realize that if I wanted a slew-drive now was the time to act before Chinese products prices went sky high. I checked with Paul, W2HRO at Sub-Lunar and he had stock on the 3 inch drives. Ship it!
I assembled the mount and used three M10 washers on each of the azimuth bolts as spacers to make sure nothing would bind.
As usual there was the fun of figuring out how to marry it to my Green Heron RT-21 controller. It turns out the manufacturer ships these drives with various color codes for the wire connections and even different encoder pulse counts per 360 degrees. My particular unit had a pulse count of 35962 X2 and the wires were color coded as follows:
DC Motor + Heavy Red
DC Motor - Heavy Black
Hall A pulse Blue
Ref. Voltage + Brown
Ref. Voltage Return Gray
Hall B not used Orange
Bench testing showed all was good and ready to go. However, lifting the 65 pounds (22kg) of slew-drive chest high to slip it onto the tripod mast was a full-focus challenge. Umph!
I have some shimming of the tripod to do to make it plumb and then we'll see if I can really track the moon within 0.1 degree. Thanks to Paul, W2HRO and Frank, KH6FA for sharing what I needed to know saving me hours of fiddling.
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| Getting ready to solder connectors in place and see if the motors move. |
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| Not square, level, or plumb ... yet. |
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| Telling PSTRotor the good news. |