HB9Q posted that they are
loosing the 9cm band starting in 2024 and they were looking
for any last initial EME contacts on that band. Dan has a 10m
solid dish and 100W at the feed and said "You only need a
minimal station to work me". Well, ..... I have a
minimal station! How about 30 watts and a 5 foot loop yagi,
20 dBi, my rover antenna? After setting up my "rover stuff"
in the garage and mounting my mighty 5' looper on my Az/El
mount in the driveway I met Dan on the HB9Q logger and we gave
it a go. My setup was a DB6NT transverter converted from 3456
to 3400 via a LeoBodnar GPSDO, no preamp, and a Tosibia amp.
The antenna was fed through about 5' of LDF4. The good news
is that I did get a number of decodes from Dan, the bad news
is that he never got any decodes from me, so no Q. Q65C-60
and Dan was doing all the frequency correction on his end (not
to mention all the heavy lifting). So despite the no-Q, it
was fun to see HB9Q decodes pop out of the ether using a very
minimal system (on my end).
73, Jon
W0ZQ