Getting back on the sats!

Going to get back on the sats and maybe some EME.

My sat system will be centered around a dedicated iMac, Yaesu FT-847, Yaesu 800DXA and G500 rotors, ERC-M rotor controller and Gulf Alpha circular polarized yagis on 144 and 432.

4/10 update: finished putting together the ERC rotor control boards. and hooking them to the ERC-M. This allows MacDoppler to control both the elevation and azimuth of my sat antennas.

I was very lucky to find new in the box Gulf Alpha antennas! A guy about 30 min from me had them and never put them together. He let them go very cheap! These are legendary satellite antennas and I’m happy to have scored them.

Everything is installed on a 10 ft section of Rohn 25 and a 10 ft mast. Feeding the antennas with 7/8 hardline to a diplexer and then 10 ft of LMR-400 flex to the antennas. The white box has a ARR preamp for 432 MHz but it’s not yet online.

So far been able to work a number of sats. The International Space Station has been the easiest requiring almost no effort. More to come…