Contacts were made on all these bands.

Performance of the station on 1296 MHz was not as good as in previous years.  This may be due to conditions, or to a problem with my antenna or my location on Mt Ginini.  It is becoming increasingly more difficult to find suitable places where even two required directions are not partly blocked by the trees on that mountain.

Some pictures are already on http://www.flickr.com/photos/exposite/sets and I’ll be putting some also onto the vk1da.info photo pages.

The station should be on the air by 9th January and will be active in the following weekend’s VK VHF/UHF Summer Field Day event.

More details on the VK9NA website vk9na.com

This time Dale VK1DSH and I operated as a multiop station on 50, 144, 432, 1296, 2403 and 10368 MHz.

Successes:

• Dale made several contacts on 10 GHz with Andy VK2AES operating south east of Bungendore.
• Despite leaving the feed for the 2.4 GHz dish at home, we still made a contact with Andy on that band, using a “field day special” feed constructed onsite from a piece of wire and a N type socket connected to a piece of cable through the dish centre and attached to the normal feed hardware.  Signals S9 over the 70 or 80 km path.
• Several successful contacts with Dave VK2JDS near Bathurst on 1296 MHz. Some persistence was needed for the first contact, when conditions were not so good and we had to get our beam headings right.  More power at both ends would have been a help.
• Other than that, we had a fair contact rate on 144 with many throws to other bands.
• For this event I used one of Owen VK1OD’s Roger Beep boards.  I assembled the board on the previous weekend, mounting the board into a small box with the Icom mike plugging into a socket on the RB box, and mike output to the IC910 through a short section of shielded cable. I set the CW speed to 30 wpm and selected the K option.
• Despite some thunderstorm activity in the area, we didn’t have to shut down.

Activity was a little lower than in the past.  Chris VK2DO was away on a business trip and Matt VK2DAG was roving up and down the NSW coast and unfortunately we didn’t work him once. Our score was just over 2000 points, though, with the help of the additional microwave bands. We were grateful for Andy VK2AES’s efforts in going portable on both days and giving us contacts on all bands, in particular 2.4 and 10 GHz.

VK1DA portable in VHF Field Day January 2010

The field day shack

I found a website offering data on stacking distances for yagis.  For a boom length of 1.5m on this frequency the stacking distance recommended is 2.4 wavelengths, which works out at 55cm (23cm wavelength).  The feedlines on the yagis are about 25 cm long but that’s not long enough to reach the power divider, so additional connectors and cable will be needed, eating into the stacking gain.

Next step for 23cm is to configure the power amplifier so it can be operated remotely from the tent.  I read some comments on the UK microwave reflector about power levels from IC910H not being up to the 10w level expected.  Time to get out the power meter and check mine out.

I plan to operate from a mountain southwest of Canberra, with equipment for 50, 144, 432, 1296, 2403 and 10368 MHz.  The first four bands are bands I have used before but the last two are new for my station.  The 2403 equipment will be a simple transverter driven by a FT290R radio on 144.  The antenna for that band will be a grid type dish.

The 10368 MHz equipment has been borrowed from another local amateur.  It is a transverter driven by an Icom IC202 on 144, the antenna is a dish.  It all mounts on a tripod which readily allows azimuth and elevation adjustements.

On all bands the main mode used will be voice, using upper sideband.  For some contacts with more distant stations, morse (CW) will be used as it is much easier to hear weak morse signals than weak voices.