[NLRS] A couple of preliminary questions on 10 GHz

[David Palm]

This is a timely follow up to Bruce's cool email and graphic yesterday.  He
called for more activity on 10 GHz and I hope to get there, perhaps in
2020. Since I'm making excellent progress in upgrading my station and
antennas on the lower bands, and I am actually getting on the air much more
this year, I've started to ponder what I might do on 10 GHz.

I think I'd like to follow the "10 GHz Transverter With Connectorized
Parts" idea as laid out on page 19 of a 2012 NTMS presentation:
https://www.ntms.org/files/hamcom12/Hamcom%202012%20WA5YWC_W5LUA.pdf

I already have the 1136 MHz LO source, the Rx and Tx mixers, a ~0.5 watt
PA, and I thought I'd use a scrounged LNA from a satellite dish for the Rx
front end.  So I have quite a bit of this already in hand.  Here are two
questions I'm sure someone can help me with.

First, on that diagram Bob and Al have a power splitter following the LO to
feed it out to the separate Rx and Tx mixers.  It seems like getting
sufficient LO power at 10224 MHz might be tricky and I wondered if it
wouldn't work better to have a coaxial relay that switches along with the
antenna relay to direct the LO to the two mixers?  It seems like that would
be quite a bit more efficient use of LO power.  Any reason why the mixers
need LO on them all the time, rather than be switched back and forth?

Second, I have a DirectTV dish with the two feeds.  It's physically a bit
larger than the regular DirectTV dishes.  I was wondering if this would
make a good 10 GHz dish and especially whether it would be practical (and
maybe kind of cool) to have one feed be optimized for 10 GHz but then for
the other feed to be something like a Vivaldi from WA5VJB so that it could
operate as a  multi-band feed for 5760 and possibly 3456.  Thoughts?

Thanks and 73,

David  W9HQ