My Setup

**My Arecibo Operation**
Here is my initial setup for trying to work KP4AO on April 16, 2010. The antennas are 2 x 11 element (WA5VJB design) made on wood booms. They are phased with RG58 coax and a BNC T adaptor. The radio is a Kenwood TS-2000X running 50 watts. I did not have a preamp this day, and with the low power at Arecibo I did not hear anything. The location is my back yard. On the subsequent days I moved the antennas down to the ground and extended the legs on the tripod. On day 2 I got a good preamp and added a 100 watt amplifier. I was able to copy KP4AO's SSB about 80% and got 100% copy on CW. I called long and hard but they did not hear me.

On Sunday I decided to get out the big amp. After some reconditioning work it worked well but I decided to limit power to 400 watts due to the small phasing lines and BNC connectors.

The two small pictures are 'thumbnails'. You can click them for a larger image. They show the amplifier and the way the antennas were set up on Sunday. Below is a picture of the equipment setup on Sunday. Even with the 400 watts no contact was made.

Here I had links to the files of KP4AO's recordings, but these files are no longer available.

Below is a screen shot of one of KP4AO's first receive sequences in the EME-7 file.

Note the narrow gray line in the black area. Below it you can see my signal from Saturday when I was running 100 watts. When the files were available for download you could clearly hear me calling them - proving that a small antenna and 100 watts was enough to easily work them (except for the competition!).

**Barbara and I**