GM4CXM and GM3WOJ Personal 10 GHz Beacons Alan Dimmick GM0USI and Brian W Flynn GM8BJF

Personal Microwave Beacons Beacons are a good way of generating interest in microwaves – signals there most of the time! Also keep the bands occupied! Bit of a nuisance at your home QTH if active yourself!

GM4CXM/B

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GM3WOJ/B

Origins of the Beacon Project Dawned on me that some of the Cairngorm peaks are LoS from both Edinburgh and Lowlands and East Coast of Ross and Cromarty Planned a QSO using “Grampian scatter” from Chris Tran’s QTH Chris offered to Host a beacon if I provided it.

Locations and Scatter Plot

Path Profile

Block Diagram of Hardware

Hardware

Installed on Tower

View South to Ben Macdui

Receiver Monitor Dish in IO85JV

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Dish and Receiver

The Receiver (Not Pretty!)

Live Audio http://gm8bjf.no-ip.org:5700 http://192.168.0.7:8000

Doppler “Tail”

Beacon Specification Callsign GM3WOJ Location IO77WS62 Mode(s) JT4G + FSK Frequency 10368.400 MHz Reference OCXO (Usually within 500Hz of nominal carrier frequency) Power 700 mW Antenna 35 cm off-set parabola (Ex BSB dish) Beamwidth 7 degrees Beam heading ~165 degrees JT4G timing GPS

Acknowledgements Chris Towns G8BKE – Donation of PA Susan Kivlin – Soldering of LMX2541 to PCB David Anderson GM6BIG – Donation of OCXO Chris Tran GM3WOJ – The location. Andy Talbot G4JNT - for doing the hard work sorting out the JT4G coding.