Wintertime

We have now entered a real wintertime here.
Temperature is at highest -5 during the daytime and down to -10 during nighttime and more or less powder snow falling everyday.
In total we have more then 40cm of snow and even driving the snowmobile is difficult in some places.
Closer to the coast line they have had really much snow during the past few days and below is a picture when I went to work Monday morning.
Did meet one car and it was OK as long as you did not stop and just kept moving all the time but the guy I met did stop so he got stuck.

Road to work Monday morning. 

So all antenna work are closed down and last week I was hit by the annual flu so just some minor work has been done but nothing related to the EME station.
The antenna has at the moment not so much snow on it and matching is good and the snow falling now when its cold is very light and will blow away.
Looking forward to the Guatemala dxpedition next weekend and I exchanged the preamp last week as it was not the best and some of the lost RX performance is restored.

Was active during friday and saturday eavning but activity was not that high.
Dubus contest was running and a lot of CW activity and I hrd a lot but I am not really used to the RX of the Anan radio in CW.
Feels like I have difficulties adjusting for a good AGC behavior together with bandwith for weak CW RX so I need to use it more to find my settings.

The heat sink I have planned to use for the Italab 70cm amp is huge and I need to cut it in half.
I got two of them with the plan of use parallell FET amps for both HF and 2m.
Will cut it this week and build a casing for the whole amp.

Snow Again.

Need to rename my dual pol test antenna to the snowmaker instead of rainmaker.
From Friday afternoon to Saturday eavning we got more then 30 cm of really sticky snow.
All antennas are cowered and even the 80m dipole was more or less laying on the gound as the end spring was pulled to maximum length du to the wieght of all snow stuck to the antenna element.
So no antenna test this weekend and it will be cold the remaining of the week so the snow will stay on so John, the WW will be in use the whole week.

Will keep myself occupied with indoor work for some time now but have plenty of unfinnished projects to start up again and I also have a Italab KW pallet on 70 cm I bought a few month ago that also needs to be put together.
Will use the PQL controller as base and also PQL low-pass filer and directional coupler but everything controlled by a ON7EQ controller and display unit.

The Rainmaker

Long time since the last update but the weather has not really cooperated with the efforts of antenna evaluation.
The YBN 25 el and 14 element combo ( The Rainmaker) is completed and I and John ZS6JON has done some promising tests.
John transmitted on his Rainmaker and I could easily detect him when he transmitted on the V 14 el part and I RX on my 8 times 25 el. but nothing what so ever when he used the Horizontal 25 el.
Dan HB9Q had his RX chain and reported to Livecq and the results corresponds very well to the estimations.
So an overall very successful first test of Johns antenna.

My Rainmaker

I just listened on my as I did not fit a TX relay to the setup and at the time there where only EU stations active and the pol was close to H all the time.
Did hear both SM5EPO and S51LF easily on the single 25 el and compared to the 8 times 25 el showed actually quite small difference.

First decode is with the 8 times 25 el and the last two with a single.

My conclusion is that the single works well and I have something not fully OK in the 8 25 el array at the moment.
We have had a lot of rain this fall and winter and its not completely impossible some has made its way into a connector or cable.
It really does not matter as the antenna works OK and I have already planned to rebuild the feeding to open wire feeds.
The vertical parts that I also most likely will add will have coaxial feed-lines so I need to check what has happen with these to avoid problems in the future.

The forecast is that the temperature is going down but I hope I can make some more test during the weekend when the dec is still high and window to the US and more shifted polarization.