LRS member Brian Flynn GM8BJF has installed a new 3cm microwave beacon at the QTH near Invergordon in grid square IO77ws of well-known DXer Chris Tran GM3WOJ (and using his callsign). This is Brian with the equipment on the side of Chris’s lowered mast before it was raised to give a beacon height of 11m, beaming at 165 degrees. This allows scatter propagation over the top of the Cairngorm mountains and reception in Edinburgh at Brian’s QTH at a distance of 215km. It has also been heard in Bishop Auckland, Co. Durham at an amazing distance of 376km. The beacon sends GM3WOJ IO77ws in both CW and JT4G digital.
Click for Streaming Audio. (Click on M3U and wait – possible delay).
Brian writes:
Chris’s beacon is now on the air. I was up at his QTH at Lamington near Invergordon in Ross & Cromarty in grid square IO77ws earlier this week installing it. I built up the hardware and the dish. The hardware is a G4JNT LMX2541 synthesiser chip programmed to run ~3.4 GHz. The output of that is then tripled in frequency to 10368 GHz and amplified up to about 700mW which is fed to the 35cm dish. The frequency shift keying is done by directly re-programming the synthesiser. The dish is beaming at 165 degrees which is at the Cairngorm peaks and onto Edinburgh. It is a decent signal (S1-2) on a 40cm dish at my QTH and even louder on Alan’s (GM0USI’s) 90 cm dish on the Braid Hills Road. (S3-4). At home it decodes solidly on JT4G all the time. The frequency is 10368.400MHz. Currently it is about 100Hz low of its nominal frequency. It uses an OCXO rather that being GPS-locked.
The beacon is mounted on one of Chris’s (smaller) towers at about 11 M AGL and has a clear shoot to the Cairngorms. It is mounted just below his 10m beam and did not miss a beat when he pumped full power out on 10m just a metre away from it. Got the RF hardening right! Chris was a bit disappointed!
What started all this off was the realisation that the Cairngorm peaks were line-of-sight from both ends of the path and we could scatter signals over them.
If you get on a north-facing site with a view over Fife and beyond you will hear it. The path is 215 km and rises to 1200m above the earth curvature.
Please put any reports on Beaconspot.eu. I got absolutely no response when I posted details on the UK Microwaves reflector. ;-(
Brian, GM8BJF
http://www.beaconspot.eu/beaconcm.php?beaconcall=GM3WOJ&bandmhz=10368 (Map of spots).
http://www.beaconspot.eu/beaconc.php?beaconcall=GM3WOJ&bandmhz=10368 (List of spots).