Hi There, My name is Tom (ZR6TG) and welcome to my Satellite Adventures site.
This site will mostly contain posts about my adventure in radio amateur satellites. I’m currently setup for Oscar 100 (both narrowband and wideband) and have recently built a LEO tracking station. The aim of this site is to document my adventures for my own future notes as well as sharing information for anyone who is interested.
My station is setup in sunny South Africa in a small town called Vanderbijlpark.
Hi Tom, could you please send me a link to download LongMynd client for Android. I promise I will not request technical support :-). My friends ok1phu and om0ms are already testing the client. Thank you. Vladimir ok1mrs.
I have already downloaded and installed. Great application. Thank you. Vladimir
Hello Tom,
I saw the picture of your sat antennas on the front-page of your website. I saw that you are using the cross Yagi for 2m and 70 cm from Wimo. Together with a friend (ON6AJ) of mine, we purchased also two of these antennas but we are not so happy with the 70 cm antenna. We did some return loss measurements and it came out that this antenna was resonated above the 430-440 MHz band. This result provided a very bad SWR in the middle of the HAM band. (435 MHZ). When it is vertical polarized the SWR was 8:1.
We did the test on a small antenna pole at 2 m above the ground level.
So my question is now: Did you have good experiences in the 70 cm band on transmit and receive? Did you have the chance to measure the SWR?
Just a question:>)
thanks
73 de ON4RDB
Roland
Hi Roland, apologies for late reply. The blog has loads of spam I had to work through first. When I originally bought the antenna I had some swr issues. I contacted wimo and they sent me a few spares which resolved the problem. My 70cm antenna is good for tx/rx in the 435 to 438 range (satellites part of our bandplan). I run mine on rhcp using the wimo phasing cable. That way I get 1.5:1 between those frequencies. I’ll have to test again on vertical/horiz alone as I can’t remember those values. Antenna works well for satellites, but not so great for terrestrial. With SWR that bad I would recommend you get in touch with Wimo.
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your reply.
We have sent the 70 cm antenna back to WIMO. They have send the antenna back to the designer……to be continue…
73 Roland