[AReU] AREU Meeting next Tuesday

[Tony Stone]

I have finished a rudimentry transverter for 2304 MHz and will have it at
AREU
alone with another 2304 transverter that I purchased at Dayton two years
ago.
I will bring both and we will communicate across the room on 2304 MHz like
we (almost ) did on 1296 MHz. I have already tried it out and it works so
(hopefully) there will be no surprises like a noisy local oscillator.

At the hamfest I came upon some wonderful equipment for the 13 cm (2304 MHz)
band. I have enough stuff to build two transverters with 20 watts output and
one
with 6 watts output. There were mixers, linear amplifiers, low noise
amplifiers,
circulators, local oscillators with ovenized oscillators and plenty of
coaxial jumpers.
I will bring some of this equipment along for show and tell. I have a
defunct 20
watt amplifier (that really hurt) that I will bring to show the inner
workings. It is
a work of art. Too bad it doesn't have any gain or output. You will be
surprised
at how it is built. It has gold plated straps for board inter-connections
and gold
plated runs on ceramic substrate. Wilkinson power dividers are clearly
visible
and couplers (combiners) are visible on the ceramic board with
magnification.

I also came upon some 10 GHz "brick" oscillators along with some wave guide
filters, power amplifiers and circulators. If I can find or build a couple
of mixers
for this band we can have a local QSO on 10.386 GHz some time in the
near future.

I think the next problem will be finding enough IF radios to go around.

I have also constructed a coaxial sleeve antenna for 446 MHz and placed
in a piece of PVC pipe. It' better that a duck and close to the performance
of a 1/2 wave dipole. Hopefully we will have time to try it out.

Looking forward to seeing you at AREU.

73

Tony