Thursday 31 May 2018

Rainmaker evaluation.

Finally I got the opportunity to test the rainmaker antenna performance.
Last Sunday I was QRV during the ARI contest and listen a lot to evaluate the performance.
Started by measuring Sun and ground noice and it all corresponds well to the VK3UM calculations.
The 25 el has close to 2 dB more sun noice and the ground noice is very similar so the antennas are working as expected when evaluating noice.
Listen a lot on Bernd DL7APV as he was for a long time the only station Calling CQ.
The 8 stack RX at -1 to -2 dB consistent when using WSJT-X 1.8 and the single 25 el H pol he was -8 and the 14 el V pol was at -6 dB which is really good for a single antenna of that size.
Look below on the RX screen dump.
Worked a few stations with the 8 antennas and all europeans reported close to only Vert pol signals received which corresponds well to the signal I received my self.








These tests together with the short test I did before and the test John, ZS6JON did earlier convince me that the concept seems to work as expected and I will start to rebuild the 8 antennas I have.
Will remove the antennas soon and start drilling the booms and cutting all elements and prepare for the open wire feed for the 25 element antennas and I might also need do some adjustments of the stacking distances to fit the correct length of feed wires.

Will try to make some more updates from now on but up until now there has been no radio activity at all.