My new QTH

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Moving to a new QTH in Germany, I will become a DL station shortly

My new QTH is in Haselunne/Eltern JO32SQ

I have a nice QTH with lot's of space for living and my hobby's

For the time being I am building up my new shack and if I am QRV mostly it will be based on my remote setup.

I have a nice shack with lot's of space. About 50 square meters should be enough.

My new shack, just after the table was build

A few moths later it looks likes this, some equipment installed but still more to come.

Shack almost ready, still need to work on my workbench for mechanical works and soldering

Next to do is building up my antenna's for tropo and EME

Planning to build up a 15 mtr tower with my 2.5 mtr dish for 23 cm and 13 cm and my 3 mtr EME dish for 6, 10 and 24 GHz.

Not sure if I will build up antenna's for tropo on the higher bands, will depend a lot of my take off, trees are much higher here than on my old QTH.

My new antenna system

Recently I managed to get a Versatower BP60 which is now setup temporarily in my front yard
Plan is to move this to my back yard.

Its now on a stelcon plate and I am using it for a 2 mtr antenna

As experiment I mounted a 12 elements antenna on this tower to try how this is working
For this I bought an antenna from Goran at Antenna-amplifiers.com

After building up the antenna I measured the Return Loss for the 2 mtr dx band better than 27 dB, very good.

This is the antenna on top of the Versatower

After one week I already made several nice QSO's with ODX of 1716 km with help of Es working SV8PEX

 

Remote station for 23 cm

My antenna is still on my old QTH in the Netherlands JO22HB.

I can work on 23 cm using a remote system using internet and an easy setup

After I had some experience using an IC7100 transceiver remote with an Microbit remote rig
I was sure that this was a simple way of being QRV on 23 cm remote.

The only doubts I had was the high power output of my IC7100 on my IF frequency 2 mtr.
I wanted to use 144 MHz as my IF for my 23 cm transverter.

The power output of the IC7100 can be reduced, but I was not convinced that this is a safe way to use it and I expected to blow my transverter with it.

After some search I found a used IC7100 on Ebay which was sold as broken and total loss.
It had a blown VHF/UHF PA and I was able to buy this for a very small investment.

This picture shows the result of the blown PA, damage was very heavy and beyond repair for the original VHF/UHF PA,
but the rest of the set including HF was working just fine.

I made a small coax cable across the hole which gave me a transmit power of a few 100 mWatt of 144 MHz on the output of the antenna plug
That is just what I needed for my 23 cm transverter, so safe to use.

I wanted to use the IC7100 indicators for detecting my Power Output so I made a connection from my 23 cm power meter DC detector
 to the VHF power output detector from the IC7100 and I am able to see the 23 cm power output indicated on my IC7100 readout.

All was very simple to build and it worked just 2 weeks after I received the IC7100 with blown VHF/UHF PA.

Now I also needed to be able to turn my antenna remote,
I was using a Yeasu G1000 rotor so I wanted to build an interface for the rotor to be able to steer it using an RS232 connection.

I found an easy solution using an ERC interface:  http://easy-rotor-control.com/
This RS232 interface is then connected to the Remote rig and with this I am able to remotely turn my 2.5 mtr dish.

Now I needed to switch on my 23 cm PA and drive amplifier on via remote control,
for this I am using a Domotica system which I already was using Homewizard.
Using the Homewizard I can switch on the PA by just switching 220 Volt to the drive PA and the PA and to the HV supply.

With this remote setup I was QRV on 23 cm several times, during contest or tropo propagation.
see my activity page for that.

 

Building my new antenna for my 23 cm remote station

 

I started with the build-up of my new antenna mast.

The first 6 mtrs were erected in september 2016

Much too late I started again on the antenna mast, added 3 mtr
but when I climbed the mast my view to north east was not very fine
so I decided to add another 3 mtr before the rotable mast should be installed.

 

Added 3 more meters to the mast, now 12 meter high so my dish will be at 14 mtr