Sorry for the poor update rate, It’s been a lot of people around a lot this summer and I don’t really get the time to sit down and do these things. I spent a few days to build a wooden deck which we also bought new furniture for, it turned out really great!
After I had been down to SK3W a couple of guys from SK3W (SM3XIK & SM3SGP) came up to help me out a bit. We had plans to put an APRS I-gate up in the 60m tower and also the 868 MHz repater (XBEE) that will be used to control the inband tower site and also such things as RX 4-SQ etc that is located far away. It went well and one funny thing was that we lost power from a lightning storm and was just about to put a raspberry pie in the oven. After a while when the power hadn’t come back SM3SGP reminded me that I have an single phase oven in the barn that had never been used and was donated by SM3WMU a few years ago, when I had plans to rebuild the kitchen. So we went out and cut an extension cord which we hooked up to the oven and voila a while after we had our pie 🙂 The power came back again after a few hours.
The project went well but I do suspect that the 5 GHz Ubiquiti links causes some QRM on the APRS frequency because it feels like the I-gate does not hear as well as it should. The 868 MHz repeater works great with really good coverage several km away.
SM3SGP took down the small WARC beam which I lated put in vertical position and improved the tuning a bit so that SM2OKD who will use the beam in the future does not need to do that. I also had some resonance at some winds in the reflector that I hopefully fixed. I think SM3SGP thought it was very nice not needing to do any more climbing, getting to be the ground crew for once.
I also attached a modified 3×1 switch to the 15m tower to switch between the big 15m stack and the new WARC duoband yagi. Some work was also done on the cabinet which will be placed at the inband tower site.
