For the October SHF UKAC, Richard G8FUO and I decided to return to Britwell Hill (IO91LO98FM) 229m ASL on the Chiltern Ridge just North of Nettlebed. I'd visited this site and operated there in the 70cm, 23cm UKAC's and in the September UKuG 24GHz contest. I was keen to see how it worked on the 9cm, 6cm WBFM and 3cm bands.
Arriving onsite at 8pm in the pitch black, the three GHz stations and the 2M talkback stations were quickly assembled. Thats when we experienced our first problem - I'd forgotten my toolbox with all my coax adaptors! With a N-type plug on the 2M coax and the 80W amplifier expecting a PL259 (or the FT-817ND wanting the same or a BNC), that meant no 144.390MHz talkback! We had to rely solely on KST Chat and the Zello SHF Channel.
Activity started on 6cm WBFM with Mark M0RKX/P at Broadway Tower (IO92BA) some 74km distant. Almost straight away we could hear Mark, and were able to peak his signal (and null out some rural Wi-Fi hash) using the 30dB gain TP-Link TL-ANT5830B grid dish.
However Mark could only detect an FM carrier from me, so no QSO took place. After similar problems last month I'd swapped out the Boscam Thunderbolt TS5832 2W FPV TX with my original Boscam TS832 0.6W unit and it worked fine during "near-field" testing, but failed "far-field". We also tried with Matt and Stewart on Cleeve Hill, their signals were very strong and they could detect us but with low/no audio. Subsequently I've purchased some new mic op amps and will attempt to fix the audio for November's contest. However, it was encouraging to confirm that we could work both groups from Britwell.
On 9cm with the 60cm offset dish, tin can feed and 0.2W from the DB6NT Transverter, we had to improvise pushing the N-type coax plug into the BNC socket on the FT-790R Mk1 70cm IF. It was good for us to both work Mike G8CUL (IO91JO 12km) for the first time, and also to work Neil G4BRK (IO91HP 24Km) again for a couple of local QSO's. We failed with G4LDR (IO91EC 71km) and G4ODA (IO92WS 141km). The Bampton 9cm beacon GB3LPC on 3400.9350 MHz in IO91FR was a massive end-stop signal over an unobstructed 39km LOS path. I spotted it on on Beaconspot:
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| 9cm GB3LPC Spotted! (Source: Beaconspot.uk) |