Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all of you.

Friday night was the evening of miracles amd I got an early gift from Tom MX0CNS.
We actually manage to work with him using his 17el DG7YBN yagi and 60W at the feedpoint.

I forgot to save a screendump of the QSO so I borrrowed it from Tom but he was -27dB with me and a fairly easy QSO after all.
The most amasing thing to it all is that he also worked Peter PA2V with his 4 yagis.

Did also work my neighbor Tobbe SM7EOI on the moon and he was also strong.
Tropo signal was of course strong too but doppler was 700Hz so easy to detect the moon reflections and as I use SDR RX it was easy to just adjust the filter width to block the tropo signals out.

I wish all of you and your families a really merry Christmas.

Frozen

The antenna is completely frozen at the moment and return loss on the H Array is Close to 4 so not possible to work at this time.
Did work some last weekend and Adelio IZ2DJP who has a single yagi and 200W was -21 dB and good own echoes.
Plan to be on this weekend if the snow and frost melts as the open wire feed is completely covered with snow at some places.

Managed to program the OE5JFL controller too and it seems like the serial port on the computer was not working properly as it worked when using an USB to serial adapter.
Will continue later this week with the encoders and buttons so I can make the necessary changes of time and location.
I have the H bridges for controlling of both axis with PWM which will be a nice feature as the azimut axis sometimes moves too fast and a ramped start and stop would be really good.

Will take some time off work and relax after a very busy time at work where we have moved the whole office and all labs to a new location and someone thought it was a good idea to make me responsible for the whole thing. Puhhh.
Will do some carpentry work at the workshop in the barn and hopefully start the renovation of a rear axle to the summer car as it has a slightly bad bearing.

ARRL 2nd

SRI for no update but to much to do at work and at home with other stuff.

The total result for ARRL was 72 QSO and 37 multipliers for a total of 262 700 points which is more then double the score from last year.
Activity seems higher then last year and I still missed a lot of stations I heard which is inspiring for the future.
Worked a handful of single yagi stations with low power with the smallest I think was G3LGR with a 14 el DG7YBN and 200W who was -20dB with me.
Heard a few small stations that did not copy me so I need higher power then the 500W I used now and the Italab pallet PA is on hold at the moment due to other projects priority.

The only hardware issue during the two weekends was that I lost elevetoin indication on friday evening before the 2nd part but it was a poor connector and easilly solved.
Experimented a lot with the dual pol setup and it works exactly as predicted but I have some noise in the area causing problems in some cases but have not found anything while searching.
It can clearly be seen both in the SDR spectrum display and Map65 as pulsating or changes in noise levels in both time and frequency domain.
Need to continue searching as its quite irritating and lowers the RX performance quite a bit.

Had some problem with Map65 that stopped decoding after been on for a few hours and reporting to Livecq was irregular and missed a lot of stations from time to time.
To resolve it I needed to reboot the computer so I need to evaluate that further to figure out why it  happens.

Have been looking for a PA controller that is remotely controllable and able to monitor all parameters as my intention is to have the complete station remote controlled but have not yet found anything really usable.
My programming skílls is limited and a task like that should be to much and take to long time for me.
The search and work continues.