September 7th MAD activities

Things did not go well this month.  I was operating from the Comfort Inn parking lot in EM58as near Edwardsville.   I was mainly trying to have a QSO with Herbert AF4JF who was at the YMCA in EM48sq.  I was able to hear the St. Louis beacon with an S3 - S6 signal.  I tried sending with my dish pointed towards the beacon, but Herbert was never able to copy me.  Using compass headings I move the dish a little bit south, but still no luck.  We switched to Herbert sending to me and I copied him.  I was not getting any reading on the S-meter.  I responded to his call, but he still could not copy me and I was not able to copy him again.  We had made this contact with no problem in July.   At that time Herbert had brought a 70cm beam to test and I had sent a signal on 70cm which he could copy and also get a starting point to aim his 10 GHz dish.  We were able to make the 10 GHz contact very quickly that day. The first picture below show where I was setup when we made the contact in July.  I tried that position again after we failed this time, but the foliage in front had grown about 3 feet in the mean time.  The second picture shows where I initially setup for this month.  

I had just replaced my 10 MHz oscillator before this test.  My previous oscillator had a LM-7812 on the voltage input.  It seemed like the voltage input to the LM-7812 was close to the edge of the voltage from my battery with the MFJ voltage booster.  I suspected there were issues with the voltage between receive and transmit. The new oscillator runs on 9 volts, so the input voltage is not an issue.   I tested it in my shop with a Tracor Voltage Difference Meter using my GPS disciplined oscillator as the reference and saw no change in frequency between receive and transmit.

After not being able to have a QSO with Herbert this month, I ran some tests at home with the limited test equipment I have and could not find any issues.  I plan on visiting Jim N0OBG this week and hopefully getting a better idea how well my 10 GHz system is working.  I will update with the results.