[FLWSS] 10 GHz Activity/Results on 16 Sept 2006

[Kenneth J. Hendrickson]

Hello all,

I lent my no-tune 10280 MHz WBFM radio to Jim Tonti KC7SSW.  He and his
son Matt went out and made contacts with me and Al Moore, W3QO, who
joined me.

One of my radios has about 10mW and a 24" dish.  The other has unknown
power and (now) an 18" offset fed dish.  This is very simple Gunnplexer
equipment.  The no-tune radio started out life as a Solfan door opener
or a burgler alarm.  I got it at Dayton back in the late 1980s.  I only
put it in front of the 18" dish in the last couple of weeks.

First we met in my driveway.  Jim wasn't quite sure that a long distance
(10 miles) contact would work, and first wanted to try one up and down
my residential street --- about 0.2 miles.  We did.  Then we headed out
to the coast.

The plan was that whoever had the radio which could be set up faster
would drive down the coast, and whoever had the radio which took longer
to set up would stay at Cape Canaveral.  We planned to go as far south
as West Palm Beach, if time permitted and contacts were made all along
the way.  The points we planned to use for contacts were:

City                    Grid            Specific QTH
----                    ----            ------------
Cape Canaveral          EL98qj          Jetty Park
Patrick AFB             EL98qf          near Officer's Club
Melbourne               EL98rc          US-192 & A1A
Sebastian Inlet         EL97su          near inlet
Vero Beach              EL97tp          Jaycee Park
Ft. Pearce              EL97ul          North Jetty Park
Stuart                  EL97vf          Stuart Beach/Martin Park
Hobe Sound              EL97wb          Jupiter Island
Jupiter                 EL96xw          Carlin Park
Riviera Beach           EL96xs          Palm Beach Shores

Jim KC7SSW did not expect the first of the logged contacts above (from
PAFB to US-192 & A1A) to work.  He was even more surprised at the
contacts that followed!

Here is our actual log:

Time (EDT)      N8KH    KC7SSW  Sigs    Distance (km)
----------      ----    ------  ----    -------------
1320-1340       EL98qf  EL98rc  S9+       9.2
1435-1445       EL98qj  EL98rc  S9       33.4
1600-1602       EL98qj  EL97su  S6       62.4
1635-1655       EL98qj  EL97tp  S3       86.9
1737-1738       EL98qj  EL97ul  S2      107.1
Failed--No QSO  EL98qj  EL97vf  noise   136.1  Failed--No QSO

The last contact, from Cape Canaveral to Stuart, failed.  It was very
late in the day, and the sun was setting.  Conditions got progressively
worse as the sun set.  I suspect we were losing the evaporation duct
conditions, which peak at about 4pm local time.  I could hear Jim at
Cape Canaveral, but he never really could hear me.  There was QSB.  The
channel would open up for 1-2 seconds at a time with very strong signals
(almost full quieting) and then close and stay closed for dozens of
seconds.  As the evening wore on, those short QSB openings became less
and less frequent.  We finally decided to quit after more than an hour
of trying.

The moral of the story is you want to be out in the heat of the day,
right on the coast, to take advantage of the evaporation duct.  I
believe that a contact between Cape Canaveral and West Palm Beach may
have been very possible with the evaporation duct still occurring.

The second moral of the story is that you want to be able to copy code
-- and copy it well --- at about 20-25 wpm.  The contact would have been
possible when we first tried it, in about 30 seconds, if Jim could copy
code.  CW gets through when almost nothing else (except very fancy signal
processing modes) does.  The contact between Cape Canaveral and Stuart
only failed for lack of a CW operator on one end of the contact.

The third moral of the story is that you want narrowband.  Narrowband
has at least a 20 dB advantage.  The contact would have been trivially
easy with another 20 dB of margin.  But hey --- don't knock WBFM.  WBFM
works, and it is very cheap!

Several times throughout the day, passers-by would have a brief chat
across the microwave link --- so many people were introduced to ham
radio and microwave activity.  All of them thought it was cool.
Al Moore and I met one former ham from the Viet Nam war days, and spent
some time talking about his 20m activity in the old days.  He was quite
impressed with the microwave activity.  No police harassed us for
homeland security reasons whatsoever.

So can I encourage any of the rest of you who have WBFM equipment into
going out and making a contact tomorrow (Sunday 17 Sept)?  How about it
George?  Chuck?  Let's go make some contacts!!!

73,
Ken N8KH

PS  Next year I'd like to have a narrowband station going.
    I start work on it this week.
    Have any of you SSB/CW guys made QSOs this weekend?
    Will you be ready next year?