Over Australia Day long weekend club members Dom VK2JNA (plus harmonic), Geoff VK2AVR, Nick VK2FS (plus harmonic) and Chris VK2HX visited Dave VK2JDS and Phillipa VK2XPH who live about an hour north of Bathurst.

The first sign Dave loves radio is the array of antennas on the homestead roof.  One’s attention is also quickly drawn to the area behind the house which is home to several satellite dishes.  Dave regularly uses his main 5 metre diameter dish to make EME (moonbounce) contacts on 23cm using CW and JT65 modes.  It is also possible to whistle at the moon on SSB and hear your echo come back 2 seconds later!!

An 800m trip up the track to the top of the hill reveals several more satellite dishes, a 20m-15m Yagi and a full wave loop on 80m and up.  The dishes are used for all sorts of microwave experiments on varying bands.

Nick brought his 23cm Yagi to test, and Dave’s weak signal source confirmed it was working as it should with good directionality and gain.  We compared the Dural beacon strength with one of Dave’s homemade 23cm Yagis as well as a gridpack with 23cm feed.

Dave also showed us his 7 watt WSPR beacon on 2m, a very neat little project.  He also has been hard at work modifying 3.4GHz panel transverters along with the Geelong ARC: 3.4GHz transverter project

We took a couple of videos using Dave’s 5m EME dish demonstrating some of the principles of aiming the dish using the Sun as a reference, and taking a noise measurement of the Sun as well as thermal noise from nearby trees:

Measuring Sun noise

Measuring tree noise

And some pics!  As you can see we had a lot of fun, and ate very well.  Monday afternoon brought some excitement as a storm blew through, which totally obscured the campsite from the homstead and vice versa as thick fog and rain descended.  Thankfully it cleared again shortly afterwards!

A great time was had by all!  Thanks Dave and Phillipa!!

These two pics are from a previous trip, where we worked a couple of stations on 23cm EME!