Transverter Tracker

Transverters for the bands we're considering (3.4GHz/5.6-8GHz). Looking for more, so please write me with any others that you find out about.

Weekly Plan 28 July - 1 August 2008

Plans for this week: July 28 – August 1

The focus for this week is on transverters, with the goal
being a summary document after the San Bernardino Microwave
Society meeting on August 7th.

Other areas of research for this week are feeds, sources,
and use cases.

Welcome to the Microwave Engineering Project development
email list! Thanks for joining. Please forward this email
to anyone you think would be interested in the development
of the project.

Send updates and work proposals to w5nyv@yahoo.com

Sign up for this list at

http://lists.uppermeadow.com/mailman/listinfo/mep-dev

Our project webpage is located at

http://www.delmarnorth.com/microwave

There is a podcast that you can subscribe to. This will
deliver project documents, audio, and video to you so that
you do not have to go check the website for them. They will
appear in the feed reader of your choice.

Weekly Report 21 July - 25 July 2008

This is a weekly report for the Microwave Engineering Project

1) Our project was announced in Bryon Foster N6IFU "ATV Newsletter" (29 July issue). Thank you Bryon!

2) Initial results from the Microwave Engineering Project exploratory phase were collected and published in the project overview document for review, comment, and critique.

If you subscribe to the feed, the document will be delivered to you automatically. The document can be found here:

http://www.delmarnorth.com/microwave/overview/MicrowaveEngineeringProjectOverview.pdf

3) Greg K6QPV from the San Diego Microwave Group has prepared two beacons for our project. They are 3.4GHz and 5.6GHz and can be installed on Mt. Miguel in San Diego County with about a week's notice. Thank you Greg!

4) Paul and I joined the uWSDR yahoo group, which is the forum for the Microwave SDR project in the UK. Please check out their project page at 

http://uwsdr.berlios.de/

The GeMMA, which is part of the uWSDR project,  sounds like something we could use on MEP, and we'll be following the development closely, as well as providing any help we're able to. uWSDR aims to provide new, open-source hardware for use on the bands above 50MHz. 

Grant writes that he is working on a full uWSDR Rx/Tx, including crossband 1.3/2.3GHz and maybe a 3.4/5.6GHz unit as well. This is very exciting news.

With GeMMA and the transceiver projects from the UK, and the transverter project from the San Bernardino Microwave Society, and the SDRs available from TAPR, and the feeds in development, we have significant parts of a prototype system coming available to us in the very near future. One of the questions for us is what bandwidth do we require in order to accomplish the sorts of things we're dreaming up. 

 

5) A video report from the San Diego Microwave Group range party this past Monday, 21 July 2008 was edited and posted to the feed and on the web. This video shows some of the types of testing (minimum discernable signal and effective radiated power) that we will be doing, and shows the sort of stations that people in the amateur radio microwave community here in San Diego are currently designing and building. 

 

The video report can be found here:

 

http://www.delmarnorth.com/microwave/newsletters/San%20Diego%20Microwave%20Group%20range%20party%202008.mp4

It's a large file. It’s about 120Mb and is nearly 20 minutes long.

San Diego Microwave Group Range Party 2008

San Diego Microwave Group Range Party 2008 Video Report. By W5NYV and KB5MU.

First Round Exploratory Phase Results

First round of the results from the exploratory phase of the Microwave Engineering Project. 

Weekly Plan 21 July - 25 July 2008

Plans for this week: July 21 – July 25

1. Launch the project.

2. Continue development process for the Vivaldi (WA5VJB) and the dual-horn (W1GHZ) feed

designs. Some amount of progress occurred in both areas over the past week.

3. Continue working on the Antenna and Feed Document.

4. Develop project overview document.

5. Attend San Diego Microwave Group meeting Monday 21 July. This is the annual ranging

party in anticipation of the 10GHz and up contest coming up. I’ll be photographing and

vidographing the event for a videocast for the team.

Welcome to the Microwave Engineering Project development email list! Thanks for joining.

Please forward this email to anyone you think would be interested in the development of the

project.

Send updates and work proposals to w5nyv@yahoo.com

Sign up for this list at

http://lists.uppermeadow.com/mailman/listinfo/mep-dev

Our project webpage is located at

http://www.delmarnorth.com/microwave

There is a document RSS feed that you can subscribe to. This will deliver project documents to

you so that you do not have to go check the website for them. They will appear in the

document feed reader of your choice.

Antenna and Feed Document Update

Update of the Antenna and Feed Experiments document with a discussion of the regulations that affect amateur radio use of DSS dishes. 

Antenna and Feed Study Update

This is the first Microwave Engineering Project document update. We started filling in the population of feeds and dishes that we will be experimenting with.

Weekly Report June 23 - July 4

This is a Technical Report for the past two weeks: June 23 – July 4
1. Two possible feed designs were discussed. Paul Wade W1GHZ is working on a dual-feed horn. Kent Britain WA5VJB’s Vivaldi design is a starting point for a higher-power version. 2. Joanne Maenpaa has released for review “AMSAT Communications Interoperability White Paper Version 1”. This paper is up on the site and in the feed. She is developing this paper for the Satellite Symposium in October.

3. Productive and interesting discussion on field and portable mounting strategies and advice on tripods took place.

4. Here are the documentation and site statistics for June. There are 53 members on the namaste-dev mailing list. There are 25 subscribers to the document feed, where in addition to the automated downloads, there were 697 views of 34 items and 24 manual downloads of 8 enclosures (documents). The Namaste website required 760 megabytes of bandwidth in June. We are well within all bandwidth and disk space allocations and will be for the foreseeable future.

Interoperability Study for AMSAT

by Joanne Maenpaa. Version 1.0 for review.