[Moon] ON0EME Moon beacon upgrade

[Eddy Jespers]

Hello,

Today we installed the new PA in the ON0EME  moon beacon. The beacon is tracking the sun at the moment ( since the moon is below the horizon ) and so far all looks OK.
Temperature of the cooler is OK, IDD and efficiency look fine. The output power is back to nominal now.

While testing the beacon on the sun ( sun noise measurement ) we found that the antenna was pointing 1,8 degrees off in Azimuth. We have to find out why this happened. 
This happened also last year after a big storm. We corrected the 1,8 degrees in the controller since we had no ladder to climb on top of the mount, where the Absolute encoder is.
So the pointing on the webpage will be off by 1,8 degrees. We will correct that later.

We will leave the beacon running for 10 days to see if all is stable, before we make any further adjustments.

Tomorrow ( saturday april 27 ) at 03:30 UTC the moon will be +10° Elevation in Belgium and the beacon will start transmitting to the moon again.
Reports are welcome on the Moon reflectors. ( moon distance is 403.000 km )

Vy 73’s Eddy ON7UN


> On 23 Apr 2019, at 17:16, Eddy Jespers via Moon-net <moon-net at mailman.pe1itr.com <mailto:moon-net at mailman.pe1itr.com>> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> In the coming days we will upgrade the ON0EME 1296 Moonbeacon with a new power amplifier . ( W6PQL amplifier with MRF13750Hh
> 
> The new PA uses a 48V device so also power supplies need to be changed.
> Walter ON4BCB is going to upgrade the Monitoring and Control also to adjust the new parameters for measurements
> 
> So the beacon will be Off / On on the coming days.
> 
> After the Upgrade we will report on the reflector.
> 
> Vy 73’s Eddy ON7UN
> 
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