Tuesday, April 13, 2010 we finally got a chance to test the 5.8 GHz receiver for the UNITEC-1 ground station on the air. The weather was nice and the weak wind allowed us to be on the roof and listen for the OZ7IGY beacon 40 km away.
First, we tried using the wide-band horn antenna that we plan to use as feed for the 7m dish. We did not receive any signal from OZ7IGY and so we switched to the 40 cm IKEA dish where after we had a solid 5-10 dB SNR for almost an hour.
Watch in high definition on YouTube.
It should be noted that even though we were on the roof at OZ7SAT, we still did not receive the direct signal from OZ7IGY, instead we were receiving a reflection coming from a direction pointing roughly 80° away from the direction of the beacon. With good eyes, this can also be seen on the video using the Google map that shows where OZ7IGY and OZ7SAT are located.
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