New cable

I spent some time pulling-in a new coaxial cable to use on transmit between my PA and the QO100 tx antenna. The existing cable seems to be a bit unpredictable. The new LMR600  cable still needs to be terminated. A job for tomorrow.....

I know fairly reliably the gain of the antenna. I can measure the loss of the LMR600 at 2.4GHz and I  can measure my transmit power.

By transmitting a carrier to equal the lower beacon level, I  can compare my system against the published parameters for the narrowband transponder. As the transponder parameters were changed this last weekend It will be interesting to see how far the transponder parameters now varies from those original figures.

The nice thing about the LMR600 is that it is rigid enough to be forced through the now-congested duct into my shack!

My 738 to 144MHz downconverter is now GPS locked so I can see, with the upconverter and LNB also being locked, that the FT847 has about a 350Hz offset between 144 and 432MHz. That is getting a bit much and needs to be corrected.

QO100 transmit (uplink) antenna

Sam