Daily Archives: 4/16/2010

The moon is quiet…

Sigh. Not hearing anything from the Moon.

Tuning into the live ustream.tv video/chat line it appears that lots of people with much larger/better setups than me are also having difficulty hearing anything, so I am not the only one. Given that under the best of circumstances, my unproven antenna would have barely enough gain, I think this attempt has been somewhat unsurprisingly unsuccessful.

Sarah was nice enough to at least snap a picture of my standing out in front with my antenna, looking goofy.

12dbd (optimistically) ain't cutting it, even with Arecibo on the other end...

Addendum: It appears that they didn’t have their power amplifier up today, so were operating at a lower power level than was originally hoped. With luck, they’ll have that fixed and will be +13db tomorrow by comparison. I suspect that still might not be enough. But I’ll try again tomorrow, just in case.

Counting down to Arecibo…

So, my barely finished antenna got just one basic operational test last night. I monitored the pass of SEEDS II, which was squawking in Digitalker mode on 437.485, which is somewhat higher than the nominal frequency this thing is tuned for (it’s centered for operation around 432). I haven’t really tried SEEDS II in a while, so I can’t compare the relative signal strength, but at times the signals were quite strong, but I seemed to have difficulty tracking and had to keep rotating the antenna (polarization seemed to be shifting alot). I can’t remember its output power, but it must be quite low (well under 1 watt, 100mw wouldn’t be far off). I hadn’t heard it in FM/Digitalker mode before, so I wasn’t ready to record it, but I suspect I would have not had a great recording because of fading.

In about 30 minutes, a fifteen degree pass of AO-51 out over the Pacific will occur, and then in about two hours, Arecibo operations should begin. I’m carting my FT-817, a pocket recorder, some headphones and my antenna (probably toss in the Arrow too) and bringing them to work, and hoping I can hear something during a coffee break. Stay tuned.