| Carasat Meeting Photos by Ed Cabic 6/1/02 |
The meeting was to assemble the equipment together and practice operating. Unfortunately, the only bird up in the afternoon was RS-15 which we had not worked before. This bird has 2 meters up and 10 meters down. We began at noon and since the first RS-15 was not up until 1:50 pm, we used Art's antenna tuner to check out 3 440 antennas.
Since we did not have our regular set of cables on site to connect the radio to the antennas, Jon fixed up two connectors to a length of RG213 that John had recently purchased so we could operate.
The antenna controller from Bernie was not working with the software and so as the 1:50 pass came we used Dave's Arrow antenna to provide the 2 meter uplink. We connected the 2 meter cable from the radio directly to the 2 meter antenna so we could avoid the 10 watt limitation if we connected to the antenna's duplexer. See the photo above of Dave with the antenna. He used his Palm PDA running PocketSat to obtain the az and el coordinates to point the antenna for the pass. We did not hear the RS-15's beacon.
For the next pass at about 4 pm Art brought back his antenna controller and did some last minute surgery to align up the many wires to the az-el rotators. Although the software seemed to be controlling the send and receive frequencies in coordination, we never heard a solid beacon signal.
POST MEETING
1. We will meet again on Saturday June 15, 2002. The time will depend on when there are good satellite passes.
2. On the Club's 440 antenna Art reports:
After procuring four 1/8" brass rods, and replacing the driven elements with
said rods, the DC resistance on each of the driven elements is now .1 ohms
or less, and the antenna now shows 1.0:1 SWR at 432 Mhz. At 435, it is
1.1:1. I think we are back in business.
3. Field Day is June 22-23, 2002.
