All posts by Fred Kemmerer

ARRL New England Dvision Director. I enjoy station building, contesting and helping new folks to join and have fun with our hobby.
Antennas, Featured, Newsletter, Space, Station Equipment

Satellite Station Antenna Upgrades

We’ve been making good use of our Satellite Ground Station. Our existing 2MCP14 and 436CP30 antennas have enabled us to make over 2,000 satellite contacts; working 49 of the 50 U.S. States, 290+ Grid Squares, and 31 DXCCs. Our station is also an ARISS Ground Station which enables us to help Schools around the world talk to astronauts on the ISS.

As you can tell, we are pretty active on Satellites so we decided to take our station up a level by upgrading our antennas. We choose larger yagis with booms over 18+ ft in length. The upgrade required us to improve the mechanical aspects of our Satellite Antenna System as well…

Source: Satellite Station 4.0 Part 12 – Antenna Upgrades

We’ve been pretty busy with antenna projects at AB1OC-AB1QB this fall. In addition to building a new EME Antenna System and Station, we’ve also been working on upgrading our Satellite Antennas.

Satellite Antenna Upgrade

The Satellite Antenna project was a pretty challenging one. We opted for the largest available circularly satellite antennas available from M2 Antenna Systems.

Satellite Antennas On the Tower - Parked
Satellite Antennas On the Tower – Parked

Getting these antennas to be mechanically reliable, properly aligned, and operating smoothly required us to make some custom modifications to the hardware associated with our Satellite Ground Station.

Cross Boom Counterweight and Trusses
Cross Boom Counterweight and Trusses

The article above covers the construction and adjustment of the new antennas. It also covers several custom enhancements that we made to our satellite antenna support system.

Aircraft Tracking Antenna System Addition

Satellite Tower Infrastructure including ADS-B Antenna
Satellite Tower Infrastructure including ADS-B Antenna

We also added an outdoor antenna for our FlightAware ADS-B Tracker as part of the project. ADS-B is a relatively recent aircraft tracking system. Our new ADS-B antenna has increased our Tracker’s contribution to the ADS-B network considerably.

If you’ve ever wondered what goes into building and putting up a high-performance satellite ground station, take a look at the article. The ideas shared there are applicable to the construction of any VHF and above antenna system – especially those that utilize elevation rotators and thus require balancing.

Fred, AB1OC

Antennas, Featured, General, Newsletter

EME Station 2.0 Part 13 – H-Frame Enhancements

Our new 2m EME Antenna System has been performing very well. One area that we noticed that could use improvement was the alignment of our antennas as we move them in the Elevation plane. We’ve added some custom enhancements to our EME H-Frame to address this problem…

Source: EME Station 2.0 Part 13 – H-Frame Enhancements

EME H-Frame – The Problem

Any antenna system that involves large, multiple yagi antennas is bound to need some tweaking to work at its peak potential and to be mechanically reliable. Our recently constructed EME antenna system is no exception. We added some elements to properly balance our EME H-Frame assembly when we put it up.

We found that the antenna tended to change their alignment when we rotated them in the elevation plane. A solution to reduce some of the stress on the fiberglass components in our H-frame was also needed.

The Solution

Custom EME H-Frame Truss Enhancements
Custom H-Frame Truss Enhancements

The solution to these problems was a Custom Truss System that we worked with Matt at XX-Towers and Robert at M2 Antenna Systems to create. We built the new Trusses using non-conductive Phillystran cable and Turnbuckles. The parts were carefully arranged to keep all of the metal components that were added at the center of our antenna array to prevent any impact on the system’s antenna patterns.

We had a 50-foot Boom lift at our QTH recently to enable some upgrades to our Satellite Antennas. We made good use of it to install our EME H-Frame enhancements as well.

This part of our EME Project is a good example solution for some of the typical mechanical problems one encounters when building a large antenna system.

You can see and read more about what we did via the link above.

Fred, AB1OC

Digital, Featured, Newsletter, Station Equipment

EME Station 2.0 Part 12 – Station Software

Software is a big part of most current EME stations. The JT65 Protocol, which was created by Joe Taylor, K1JT, has revolutionized EME operations. It has made it possible for modest single and two yagi stations to have fun with EME…

Source: EME Station 2.0 Part 12 – Station Software

Operations using EME or Moonbounce communications is all about software. Every station’s software architecture and configuration is a little different.

2m EME Software Block Diagram - Phase 1
Station Software Block Diagram – Phase 1

We recently put together our software suite for our new 2m EME station. Our setup features multiple JT65b digital decoders, automatic tracking of the Moon, computer logging, and some useful web-based tools that make finding QSOs easier.

EME Software Operating Environment
EME Station Software Operating Environment

Our Phase 1 station configuration is mostly about integrating all of the components in our setup, sorting out operational issues, and learning to use all of the new software and hardware in our new Station.

MAP65 Software
MAP65 Software

Our primary software application is MAP65. This program can decode all of the signals on a given band at the same time. This is very useful during an EME Contest and for finding contacts during day-to-day operations.

You can read all about our software setup for our station via the link above.

Fred, AB1OC

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