ES3RF: Estonian HAMRADIO Station

Hard job and nearly impossible to get ALL US states on 1296 mhz from Europe.
But! We have a Moon. And my station is equipped good enough for Moon Bouncing.
And, of course, thanks for two enthusiasts Gene Shea (KB7Q) and Peter Van Horne (KA6U) this dream has come true! Story of Peter’s expedition on his blog.
 So, 47 states are worked and 46 are confirm. Very hope, I can send application for the award on the next year.

Yes, new 2022 year is started. For my shame, I did not touched  my WEB site over 8 moths. Why – can not say. Although, many events happened in passed year. The main – I stopped EME on 2 meter. The reason – huge level of “electronics smog” in my area. It depend from the time of a day, but never gone!  Much less on 70 cm and nill on 23 cm.
It means, for a nearest future I will QRV only on 70 and 23 cm bands.
So, I dismantled my 4 x 2M18XXX array and, hope, it doing great job at another owner.
On this mast now are: 9 el long yagi for 6 M band (12 meter long) and HF antenna DXer-206 (20-17-15-12-10 M bands). Picture of the new antennas is below:

DXer-206 and 9 el for 6M

Another event: I had new power amplifier for 23 cm band. This is 
L-band MOSFET LINEAR POWER AMPLIFIER MKU 23CM-1000W CU
from KUHNE electronic. It gives me new level of EME operation on 23 cm!

So, results of my EME activity on 2021.

All bands EME QSO: 315
Band            QSOs       Inits     Grids   ODX
144 MHz:      12               8                     QRT!
432 MHz:     62              50         45      14631 km (VK4EME)
1296 MHz:  241            125        105     15059 km (VK2JDS)

For me, the CW – the Morse Code – operation in the air is a number ONE forever! This a real HAM spirit mode of operation! Of course, all other modes of operation on the air have the right to be, but radio amateur communication appeared exactly in this form.

The Hungarian Radio Amateur Society (MRASZ) commemorates the 230th anniversary of the birth of the creator of Morse code. The name of SAMUEL MORSE shall be put together from the contacts made with the callsigns representing each letter. Since some letters occur twice in the name, there will also be a joker station with a callsign of HA230MSE, which can be used to replace the callsigns containing the second M, S, and E. It is enough to work with this station once as well.
Callsign:  HA230MSE, HA230S, HA230A, HA230M, HA230U, HA230E, HA230L, HA230O, HA230R
I started my hunting for the award on 20th and finished on 26th of April. Sure, it was not hard operation. Only from time-to-time in the air. Of course, all QSO were made by CW with every callsign on different bands, excluding HA230MSE. This callsign I could not find on CW. But easy on SSB.  And I did not used HA230MSE, as a joker! Anyway,  I’ve got the Award!

I started on QO-100 in the March, 2020. After 6 month of more/less activity and around 550 CW/SSB/DIGI-mode QSOs and 4 new countries for DXCC award, I decided to stop and sold all equipment (full set from DXPatrol), excluding 1.5 meter dish. 
But 5 month later, my interest to this satellite “woke-up” again. But this time I decided to take the most cheapest way.
I have 2400/430 MHz high quality transverter for 13 cm band from SG Laboratory Ltd. So, 2W output into 150 cm dish should be enough. And for receiving on 10 Ghz just to use WEB SDR. I found the best (in my opinion) IS0GRB SDR.

150 cm dish for uplink

Easy 4 turns helix feed to the dish. The transverter as close, as possible to the dish  and in one day of a small efforts I was again on the satellite. It was on 4th of March, 2021 – exactly 1 year after my first start!
During 20 days of not very active operation I’ve added 48 new calsigns to my logbook of 82 total worked QSOs.
Of course, this is not so suitable, regarding to a real cross-band operation without computer. With the old setup I used YAESU FT-847 in satellite mode, as a station transceiver + SDR console V3, connected in parallel to RX port and using tranceiver’s CAT system. Very comfortable! Now only YAESu FT-817  for uplink…
The worse – you must manually adjust TX frequency, make a few attempts just looking to the trace on WEB SDR’s waterfall and listen to own echo. But after several days of operation I found a simple and quick way to fine tuning. Better, than nothing and cheap!
Probably, in the nearest future I will restore my real satellite operation. Who knows…
       Just one remark: on this satellite I’ve meet many people, who I met earlier on the EME and HF bands, especially on 6 meter. And many says that, like for me, this is a great opportunity to maintain and diversify your activity on the air. 

I don’t know why, but for almost a year I haven’t updated my page.
While many interesting events have taken place, I would like to highlight a few of them.
Of course, this is only about amateur radio.
So, first of all, these are year statistics.
Total (HF + VHF and UP):  2654 QSO,
including:
VHF (50, 144, 432 and 1296 MHz) terrestrial + EME:  912 QSO,
Satellite (QO-100) : 530 QSO.

 “DXCC Progress Report 32-Dec-2020” from my DSKeeper logging software:

           Mix Ph CW  DIG  160m 80m 40m 30m 20m 17m 15m 12m 10m 6m 2m
Wkd: 311  210  289  234    125      148     191     187    219     196   206  176    203  116   187
Cfm:  296  179   267  225   110      128     158    157     190     167   187   141    166  101    185

Yes, I decided to back to satellite, especially  to QO-100.
So much talking about this satellite! And I ordered all necessary converters, LNB and PA from DXPatrol (CT1FFU). Antenna  – 1.5 meter prime focus dish with dual band feed. Other detail of my setup on the pictures are here.

dual band feed

QO-100 dish

Easy and Quck decision.

I started on QO-100 on March, 2020 and was very satisfied of a big pile-up! Probably, not many stations from Estonia, espesially from KO29 were before on satellite. But after about 10 days the pile-up passed and normal work began. And ffter about half a year, working via this satellite became so routine and uninteresting that I stopped (hopefully temporarily) to work via this satellite. 530 QSO, 56 new grids (797 total via SAT) and 9 new DXCC (total 128 via SAT). 
Рowever, if ещ count only ещ QO-100, then total worked 63 DXCC and 226 squares .
Not bad! I think, I will be back on QO-100 soon. As a target – to get 150 confirmed DXCC via satellites and get lapel to my DXCC Satellite Award.
After all, my main goal was to investigate the 13 and 3 cm bands for  EME on these bands. 
Unfortunately, not so much knowledge I’ve got…

Also, in 2020 I intensely worked EME on 23 cm (76 initials, 8 new DXCC, total 51). This band is still new for me on EME. Also starting preparing for 13 cm band EME . But no one knows, how long time we can use this band for amateur purposes…

The most bad thing – the 2 meter band become noisy and noisy! Sometimes, the noise level  rise up to S9 +5 db from some azimuth. Hard to work MS and EME, even tropo/ES is a problem! I am very close totally stop any operation on this band! Thanks, stil 70 and 23 cm bands are clear enough. Pity…

So, as far as I am mainly VHF and UP – man, look the summary results here.