Montag, 26. März 2018

Current Technical Status

So far everything is working fine. The tiny Tajfun amp is working flawlessly delivering some 80% of maximum output. We do not push it to the limit to have a safety margin.

Situation on site is very good except for some pulsating noise at times - and that we can work moon rise only after 7° elevation and moon set only up to 15°. There is some blockage by a rock (CR2X contest QTH on top of it) at moon rise and neighbouring buildings at moon set. Remember, setup is in a back garden.

However, our preamp situation gives us some worries. The preamp works and stops and works and stops. Every switch-over from tx to rx is a surprise. Therefore yesterday we worked part of the moon pass without preamp (results were better than expected). This morning we opened the preamp relay and cleaned it though it was not really dirty at all let alone burned. After we put everything together it worked perfectly again. Let us keep fingers crossed.To make a bad situation worse: The spare preamp which still worked when DH7FB tested it before departure does not work at all. 

Twice yesterday we had sudden high swr which made us QRT earlier than expected. After checking cables, dipoles and connectors this morning everything is fine again.

Conditions were strange at times yesterday: Well-equipped stations like UX0FF hat great problems to be copied by us while we even worked a single yagi station with just 500 watts out. K7MAC wrote he copied us -16 or so but as soon as he sent ROs we disappeared in his rx. And we sent 5 times RRRs to him when we saw he was still sending ROs - in both polarisations. That is weird. 

Polarisations changed very often and very quickly, often from one sequence to the next. Good to have xpol available here. Yesterday we had the antennas mounted horizontal and vertical, today we will run in x configuration. We'll see if that yields better results.

CU at moonrise. 73 Frank and Bernd

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