Rob M0DTS

Juno is very far and very weak on 8.4GHz!
Only 888 Million km.

Good Luck.
For reference I was getting about 6dB sun noise when I received this.

Here's what I received, not enough signal to see all of descent though.

Blue Ghost signal received from the Moon.
It's rather weak on my 3m dish (not optimised) but it's there 😀
It's switched to a lower bandwidth now too, so easier to see.

Glad to hear it Howard!
All ok here 👍

No Radio tomorrow then.
Lets hope everyone's antennas survive this!

Cracking signal from GB3EY over the moors this evening on 1308MHz.
The duct must be just above those clouds allowing me to get over the top of the moors!

M0MLJ on 10GHz Analogue through my converter box to 1280.

Nice inversion layer visible from /P site this evening.

Last night's optical beacon trace...
The cold air has reduced humidity a lot and this appears to reduce scattering, hence weaker signal * I think!

Remote beacon reference is now just a crystal instead of a GPS receiver (to save power), seems stable enough in 0.2Hz span!

During the heavy rain overnight the qrp optical beacon showed a lot of variation but generally stronger than it is on a clear night!
The different power levels can be seen too.

Note that the qrp beacon being received in the plots above is only single ir led running 100mA on the hour, 10mA , then 1mA (20min periods)

There's been two iterations since that one.
One with 6 3w leds and the new one with 24 3w leds.
Not run at 3w though, below 1w each.

Interesting enhancement at 3am this morning, coming from my qrp optical beacon (in a hedge!) 10km away non los.
Increase in SNR for just that hour, some mist/low cloud passing by maybe?
Beacon changes power in 20min periods hence the gaps.

Image shows 2 nights for comparison.

Clive G4FVP has now received my optical signal in the middle of town (Darington) around 19km away.
Needs around 10deg of elevation on the Rx for best results.
So you don't always need really dark skies either!

Successful Non Line of Sight optical paths so far using 850nm IR:

Here is the path profile for this test

Yeah quite amazing how far it will travel!
Not a strong signal by any means but strong enough to contain a short message... more on that later.

I'm out up at IO85XF for another non line of sight optical test.
Receiving my new beacon (at home) pretty well over 94km path!
Around 15dB/0.2Hz
Should be easy to break 100km mark 😉

Another good signal from SAQ on 17.2KHz received with e-field probe.
Bit of intermod this time though from GBZ, need to shorten the probe length a little I think!

With the new optical Beacon I can change to a number of frequencies...
My 4x BPW34 photodiode Rx for NLOS tests is quite flat response, 280Hz-5010Hz tones are quite similar in S/N, just rolls off a bit at 10KHz.
You can see how it cancels out the old beacon at 2010Hz!

The new Optical Beacon works well..
~13dB stronger than the old one when set to full power which is around 30W peak power into the 24x 3W 850nm LED's.
New is seen on 1480Hz, old is fixed at 2010Hz.

Amazing how well they both cancel each other out when set to the same frequency and opposite phase!

New version of my Optical Beacon now has remote control via simple web interface.
Can now program frequency and ebnaut modulation while I'm out doing tests!
Just waiting for some INA219 modules to monitor the LED current then I can make that adjustable too 🙂💡

Work in progress on new higher power optical IR beacon on 850nm.
Hope to break 100km non line of sight path this year 🤞
24x '3W' vs old 6x 3W.