Receiving 10 GHz EME with a small dish and LNB 

When you work on everything from old tube radios to tiny SMD stuff, you can never have too many sizes of solder wick. 🙂

Thanks for the very kind comments. Decoding and hearing EME signals on 10 GHz was a huge thrill for me. I hope others might enjoy it too.

Thanks Peter. Me too!

I'm glad you found it interesting. I have another video on how I adjust for the polarization of EME signals and will be doing one shortly on how to measure sun, sky, ground and moon noise with this setup.

I am working on building a terrestrial 10 gig system for my tower. I have a DB6NT transverter, choice between 2W and 15W amp, Downeast Microwave preamp, a 2 foot Radio Waves dish and feed. I need to get it all together and work out how to power and control it. 375 feet of wire from the shack is really not an option due to voltage drop. I'm thinking battery and solar panel on the tower but still need to figure out control.

Thanks! Further EME experiments are on hold pending some means of aiming a bigger dish. I have a number of other 10 GHz projects going, including getting the dish I used for these EME tests onto one of my towers so I can try to hear some terrestrial signals.

I'm glad you found it helpful. There is another video in the series, about polarization of10 GHz EME signals. I will be doing one on how to measure sky, moon, sun and ground noise with this setup when I get some time.

Good luck! Normally I would build a filter but I didn't seem to have the right capacitor values and I was in a bit of a hurry to try this out.

Thank you!

I would like to have a tracking mount but every solution is very expensive. It is the way to go if you can do it.

Thanks. I hope so some day, lot of work and very expensive for me.

Thanks!

Thanks. I have been busy with other things but more coming soon.

Good luck with your project! I'm going to guess the umbrella dish will not have sufficient surface accuracy for 10 GHz (I could be wrong) but it will surely work well on lower bands.

@@n1bug Going to try 1.2 ghz. Seems like popular band for eme

@@wireworks616 Yes it is a very popular band and your dish should do very well there. I have a 10 foot dish in storage which I would like to use on that band someday.

Thanks, glad you found it interesting.

I love a good adventure and this has certainly been one. I would have had a hard time with the budget if I hadn't already had the Leo Bodnar GPS unit from past projects (2200 meters). Good luck, I hope you can try it someday. I have a 1.8m dish that was given to me which I would like to use for a 10 GHz EME station but aiming a dish that size is no easy task! I have no idea how I am going to do it on my budget.

I haven't personally tried it myself but I bet someone has. There are quite a number of people who are using LEDs (visible and IR) and lasers (gas and solid state) for communication with Morse code, audio, or data. I haven't followed it in a while but years ago I was in a very active online group of experimenters using light communications.

Yes, very expensive which is what kept me from trying it in the past.

Howdy Lou!

Thanks for watching!

Yes it is very interesting. I had prior EME experience on 144 and 432 MHz where the doppler is very slow and doesn't move as much. At 10 GHz it is really something to see!

I'm sorry about the rabbit hole. It happens! There are lots of interesting phenomena happening with EME. All of those parameters are of course related. We do it the other way around. Software calculates lunar distance and motion in real time, from which the signal frequency shift is calculated.

@@n1bug Mind if I ask you another question? How difficult is it to get into terrestrial 10GHz? I guess you can't use commercial LNBs like the one you show, because they are receive only and might be set to the wrong part of the 10GHz spectrum for ham radio 10 GHz terrestrial (?). I guess you need a transceiver LNB, a transvertor from uhf to/from 10GHz, and I guess feeders/waveguides and stuff like that. Any ideas here?

I welcome questions. It is not difficult. A typical terrestrial setup would be an 18 to 30 inch (45 to 76cm) dish, either offset (like the TV dishes, which work fine) or prime focus (where the feed goes directly in front of the dish center), a feed horn of some type, and a transverter mounted just behind or below the dish, connected by the shortest possible run of coax or waveguide. Receive preamplifier and higher power transmit power amplifier can be added. All of these items can be purchased new. Deals on used stuff come along occasionally but demand is often high. Most 10GHz terrestrial is portable operation because you need an unobstructed shot at the horizon for most contacts. It is difficult for many to get that from a home station. In my case I will be putting my terrestrial system on a tall tower to operate from home. You are correct that the TV LNBs aren't really useful for a transmit/receive system. They are optimized somewhere up in the 11+ GHz range. A likely guess would be around 11.75 GHz. They are not optimum for 10.368 GHz receive-only either, but this is largely offset by having no lossy feed line. The probe in the feed horn is directly connected to the LNA (preamp). Some have torn the guts out of LNBs and converted them to plain feed horns for transmit/receive use, but I will leave that to those with better rest equipment.

I'm not very knowledgeable about radio astronomy but I would say no. With a dish of this size on 10 GHz, the whole sky appears very quiet, so I don't think you will receive enough radio noise from specific sources (other than the sun) to be useful for that purpose.

Possibly but it has to be almost a perfect parabolic curve. I haven't checked any of them but I doubt they are a true parabola. The higher you go in frequency, the more accurate it has to be. What will work for receiving relatively strong terrestrial signals may not for EME signals which are much weaker.

Thanks Jan, good to see you here.

I'm sorry, I have no idea. I don't know the details of how RU-vid selects videos to suggest. I get recommendations unrelated to things I have watched also. I suspect everyone does.

You can run as much power as you want up to the legal limit of 1500 watts, but power is very expensive on this band. Solid state amplifiers can run from around $350 for 3 watts to $4000 for 50 watts. There are few (very few) surplus TWT (Traveling Wave Tube) amplifiers around up to 500 watts but few are lucky enough to find one or be able to afford it. The smaller EME stations have 10 to 15 watts.

@@n1bug wow i thought it was only 10 watts yeah thats why i didnot get into that band it is very expensive now you tell me its it's legal limit and the amplifiers are extremely expensive dam well i will still stick to what i have 👍💯⚡

@@ATOMSHAMRADIO I was fortunate enough to pick up a 15 watt amplifier for about $325. It is a surplus amp out of some kind of digital data radio system that has been retuned to our frequency around 10.368 GHz. It should be enough to some EME if I can get my 1.8m dish (which I got for free) set up. The problem with a dish that size is aiming it accurately enough! That is a whole other can of worms, but I'm thinking on it.

Yes. That's another thing I should have mentioned in the video. I spent three months looking for one, but never found any that were available.

I don't know. It has been pronounced that way over here since long before I was born!

Did ya happen to notice that American English, Australian English, Canadian English, New Zealand English, Cockney English and London English all pronounce things differently? Do yo pronounce ought, brought, sight, bright the way they are spelled? Why do Canadians say ewt and aboot instead of out and about? And if English is a Germanic language, why did they completely eff it up?

Thanks, glad you liked it.

I wish. :-) 10 GHz EME is a dream I had for many years but is extremely expensive. Maybe someday I can do it.

I hope some day I can be QRV.