Sunday, December 7, 2008

The feed is in! And, a little problem...

Just put the feed in tonight! Just need to adjust the focus and hammer out some stuff in the parabolic curve, and its ready to go, for testing anyway. The nice thing about using TV antennas is the fact that I can test the antenna on TV stations nearby to the RA band (Channel 37) to see what kind of reception I can get and (roughly) test the -3dB beamwidth(s) before I assess the performance on cosmic sources.

On a darker note, I just received and replied back and forth to a fellow by the name of Joel Gonzalez, saying that he has been problems with the receiver kit I am going to be using,

http://www.mtmscientific.com/tuner.html

regarding the IF output of the tuner. Before anybody who bought this begins to chew their fingers raw, I'm gonna build the thing. Hopefully Joel is having a localized problem with the board or something and not the tuner itself, or if is the tuner, maybe a bad batch. However Mr. Gonzalez has pointed out that you can also use the AFT pin (basically an S-meter voltage) to perform total power measurements. However for my purposes, I need the IF for further downconversion to a narrowband receiver, for when I have an L-band converter block at the front end (spectral line measurements), and for SETI. Tsk tsk, eek... :P

Anyway, I will post pics of the feed in the morning, as its about one o'clock in the morning at the time of this writing.

Cheers,

KM

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