It's good to be working on projects and doing videos again! There should be two or three more videos fairly soon, then another pause. I would be doing this all the time if I could.

Hi Drew. I would be interested in your findings. I need to try to do more phase noise checks on the beacon. Of course phase noise at 10 GHz is much higher than it is at the reference or the 1152 MHz synthesizer output but my beacon is looking better than most that have gone on the air in recent years. Many of them are only 40 to 50 dB down at 10 kHz. Mine looks to be at least 60 dB, possibly a little better than that. I don't have a proper measurement system but if I calibrate the dB scale on the SDR and S meter on the conventional receiver I can get a "no worse than" figure. Of course any estimate made this way is limited by receiver phase noise.

I will call you if I hear you Lou. I don't get on 6 much since all the DX went to digital which isn't near as much fun for me.

Thanks, I am glad you like it.

Hi Rob. 1. I am using Windows 10 Professinal 64 bit, but any recent version should work fine. 2. I'm sorry if I was confusing. You just need a recent version of regular WSJT-X. As long as it included the Q65 mode you are all set. I forget in which version that mode was introduced but it has been there for a while. There is no special version for 10 GHz. Good luck with your project and let me know if you need any other information or assistance. I will do my best to help.

@@n1bug Hi again, and thanks for the info. I do have a question that perhaps you could help with I attempted to set up but when I came to set up the radio selection in WXJT-X. I had no option for the Kenwood 2000 series radio. So as that option available in your WSJT-X or did you somehow add it to the selection. Thanks again Rob.

I apologise it is there! My eyesight failed me.

@@robertlang641 No need to apologise! My eyesight fails me frequently. I'm glad you're making progress.

Hi again getting a bit confused here I'm wondering how to correct the HDSDR frequency for the LNB I know about the manager button and that throws up a frequency but how does one correct for the 9750 Mhz frequency shift to match the dongle frequency Or am I missing something really obvious. Secondly I'm wondering what software you use to send the output from HDSDR to WSJT. Thanks in anticipation. Rob.

Lou, sorry I didn't answer sooner. I am not certain but I have seen evidence that supports a belief that it does scatter polarization somewhat, but not enough to completely randomize it. Measured data on 10 GHz EME signal loss due to polarization misalignment only goes to about 12 dB. At VHF we see at least 20 dB, so it looks to me like polarization is partly "spread" at 10 GHz. This is just a theory based on data I have seen. It makes sense that a rough surface that is moving would do that. I suspect it does to a lesser extent even at much lower frequencies.

It it good to be back at the project(s)

@@n1bug You're above my skill level, but that's how I improve my skills. Thanks for your videos and excellent explanations. 73!

@@n1bug Also, this reminds me of the video that W2AEW did on spurious key clicks coming from a China made 2 meter rig that was part of a repeater site in NYC that was causing horrible interference when it keyed on and off.

I'm subscribed to his channel but I haven't seen that one. I will look it up and watch. Key clicks can be nasty.

Thanks! More beacon videos coming later as the project continues.

The original version of the Arduino code by K6HX is here: brainwagon.org/2009/11/14/another-try-at-an-arduino-based-morse-beacon/ I haven't published my changes yet, because I still have more changes to make for reading temperature sensors and including that data in the beacon message. Let me know if you need any other information.

Thank you!

Thanks Lou. I'm having fun and learning a lot from this project.

Hello Chris, it's a pleasure to hear from you. The camera is my new smartphone, Samsung Galaxy 24 Ultra. I haven't learned 10% of what that camera can do yet. I miss LF tremendously but the antenna caused so much collateral damage when it fell I can't risk it again. I need to fix my LF big K9AY loop so I can at least listen. I got the beacon key clicks eliminated very nicely and will do a video update sometime this week. Very best regards to you.

I agree about the audio level when listening to the signal and apologize for that. I am still learning how to do this. When recording I have no means of knowing what the audio level is. I can adjust in post processing when editing the video but I keep making the mistake of setting the audio level based on my voice and not the signals. When recording it always seems like the receiver audio in the room is less loud than my voice but it doesn't come out that way in the recording. I will try to improve on it next time. Perhaps (this would be more work) the receiver audio should be recorded as a separate track from my narrative. Then the levels could be set independently. The pipe cap video is a long one. My method of doing them ended up being rather unusual but it worked for me. :)

I'm having a lot of fun learning and experimenting with 10 GHz!

Great to hear from you Lou. The beacon is still in development and has not been installed yet. It is destined to go at our repeater site on Stickney Hill when finished. That should be a reasonably good site. With my RX-only dish at home I have heard W1GHZ and several beacons on rain scatter, snow scatter, and tropo.

Thanks for the feedback. There will be at least one more beacon update soon, likely two.

Thanks.

I would like to have a tracking mount but every solution is very expensive. It is the way to go if you can do it.

I'm not sure about a full transmitter but a PA is easy. There are two basic forms, class D and class E. I successfully built and used both on 2200 meters. There are several designs on the web. Information about the two I built and some of my other transmitting and receiving equipment can be found here: www.n1bug.com/lfmf/

@@n1bug alright i will check it out! Thank you!

I worked about half a dozen stations in North America, two on CWE and the rest on digital modes. My best distance QSOs were 2E0ILY, G0MRF and DL7NN on digital modes. I am sure there would have been more but mMy antenna came down in a storm three years ago and I have not been active since.

Wow, that's neat! I'm sorry your antenna came down though, hopefully someday you can put them back up again😊

Thanks. I could put it back up any time. The problem is it caused damage to other antennas, towers and rotators when it fell. All antennas were covered with wet sticky snow at the time. It was a tremendous weight. When the 2200m antenna broke and fell, the sudden reduction in side loads caused both towers to move a bit a top, quite violently. That sudden motion combined with the weight of the snow on everything is what did the damage. I can't risk that happening again. 2220m is a lot of fun!

When you work on everything from old tube radios to tiny SMD stuff, you can never have too many sizes of solder wick. 🙂

@@n1bug i always runout on this wick.... you can never have enough :D

Thanks for the very kind comments. Decoding and hearing EME signals on 10 GHz was a huge thrill for me. I hope others might enjoy it too.

Howdy Lou!

I tried that with one of them but my 70 watt soldering station was not able to get the job done. I tried using a big tip, flux, etc. but it just didn't heat the solder under the pads enough.

I'm not very knowledgeable about radio astronomy but I would say no. With a dish of this size on 10 GHz, the whole sky appears very quiet, so I don't think you will receive enough radio noise from specific sources (other than the sun) to be useful for that purpose.

I haven't personally tried it myself but I bet someone has. There are quite a number of people who are using LEDs (visible and IR) and lasers (gas and solid state) for communication with Morse code, audio, or data. I haven't followed it in a while but years ago I was in a very active online group of experimenters using light communications.

Good luck with your project! I'm going to guess the umbrella dish will not have sufficient surface accuracy for 10 GHz (I could be wrong) but it will surely work well on lower bands.

@@n1bug Going to try 1.2 ghz. Seems like popular band for eme

@@wireworks616 Yes it is a very popular band and your dish should do very well there. I have a 10 foot dish in storage which I would like to use on that band someday.

I am glad we don't get these winds too often. We just had another such storm about two weeks ago. Fortunately this time the only damage was antennas that slipped on the mast, but climbing the mast to reach them was interesting. I enjoy climbing at 59 and hope I have many more years of it. That tower now has the TH11DX at 100 feet, a 10 GHz dish at 106 feet and OptiBeam OB1-4030 at 112 feet. Yes, I had to reach the top antenna!

In the U.S. if you want to transmit using your amateur radio call sign with amateur radio privileges, you must notify UTC and wait at least 30 days to see if they object. If they don't, you are good to go. If you want to transmit with privileges not allowed under amateur radio rules you can apply for a Part 5 license. There are very few of those now that we have amateur privileges on 2200m.

I have been away from YT for a while. I hope your project went smoothly.

I wish I was in the footprint of QO-100. Would be interesting to try that.

Thanks. I have been busy with other things but more coming soon.

Thanks for the comment. I know it is unusual to use washers with jam nuts but I lack the skill to do it without them. The tuning is extremely touchy on the 10 GHz filters. Without the washer, the transition from jam nut putting no tension on the tuning screw and full tension happens in a very small fraction of a turn of the nut. This makes it very difficult for me to keep the filter peaked while tightening the nut. The split washer smooths out the transition, applying tension to the screw more slowly, allowing for it to be more easily re-adjusted as the jam nut is slowly tightened. I wonder if a modification to use a tuning screw with finer thread and/or a thicker nut soldered to the pipe cap would help with this. I will check to see if alternate hardware is available before my next project using pipe cap filters.

Thank you. This is the first time I have heard that the sky is not uniformly quiet at 10 GHz. I know it is not at lower frequencies such as 144 and 432 MHz where I had prior experience. When I asked about using sky/sun/ground noise measurements to evaluate feedhorn (LNB) placement and performance of this system, everyone said it would not matter as long as I was not pointed at the sun or moon. Maybe they meant "with this size dish"? Now I want to do more experimentation with this, when and if I get a dish on a proper mount where I can more easily steer it and up higher where it can see more of the sky without also seeing trees or my other antenna structures.

@@n1bug Here's a paper that compares galactic sky maps made at various frequencies from 10 MHz to 94 GHz. It has a section that shows visual images and references to various studies of the energy received from the sky at different frequencies that might be interesting to you. arxiv dot org/pdf/0802.1525.pdf This is a radio continuum map made of the galactic plane at 10 GHz: cade dot irap dot omp dot eu/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=nobeyama

@@n1bugI'm not sure if the links to those papers are making it through the comment filter or not. Google for "nobeyama 10ghz radio continuum" and you'll get the 10 GHz map of the galactic plane. Google for "arxiv Angelica de Oliveira-costa galactic radio emission" for the paper talking about sky maps at various frequencies. You might find them interesting.

Thank you. I think what I was seeing that day may have been noise from the "warm" snow itself or the snowflakes reflecting ground noise. I think that because changes in noise level tracked so well with intensity of the snow. It makes sense that clouds would have some influence. It would be interesting to investigate this further.

Thanks. I have a lot of experience figuring out how to do things with what is available.

Of course. But when you are on a small budget you make choices about how to best use available resources. Now that I learned how to do this with the tools I have, next time it will be much easier and take less time. The money I didn't spend on tools can go on parts for interesting projects.

Your point is well taken. Unfortunately this is a confusing situation. If I refer to them as LNBFs then I am using different terminology than the manufacturers and vendors, who label and sell them as LNBs. That would tend to create confusion for my viewers. I should have mentioned that LNB is technically incorrect despite common usage.

Apparently the colloquial terminology is changing, now that they are integrated.

I didn't get deeply into it, but I did listen for NDBs during my time on LF. The make good propagation indicators.

Great! 10 MHz is not very useful for the Ku band LNBs as I think they all need 25 MHz. But it is very good for a lot of other things. I have a Trimble Thunderbolt GPSDO that is the master 10 MHz reference for test equipment and VHF/UHF ham gear. I definitely know about projects on the pile. I have a pile here.

That is a good question. I did some research before answering your question. There has been much debate over many years about whether it is best to use circular or linear polarization on 10 GHz. Some seem to believe one way, some the other. I dot yet have enough experience to have an opinion.

@@n1bug Sounds like the way to solve this is experimentation!

I should have tried to measure the size of those parts. They are a LOT smaller than the 0805 parts I used in the beacon project. I suspect the smaller ones are 0402. I've had to adjust the audio a bit low on all of my videos, otherwise voice peaks clip and distort. I guess my speaking is too dynamic. I tried forcing myself to speak with consistent loudness. Didn't work. Those voiceovers really sound muffled or compressed to me. I will try a different microphone soon. I used a different camera this time for the video segments. Audio on it was not as good as on the camera I had been using, but the camera part is much easier to work with. I have as much to learn about making videos as I do 10 GHz!

@@n1bug Again no big deal on the audio. I was able to clearly understand you so I wouldn't worry to much about it. Sometimes things like the room that the videos are filmed in can even be a factor on some people's videos. Excellent content none the less.

I'm glad you found it helpful and thanks for letting me know. I always hope some part of what I cover will be of use to someone.