Hi all,

Now back home in Kiruna, Sweden again - but only until tomorrow, then I have to hit the road again for two weeks of business travel. So FYI I will try to summarise here what went as planned and what didn't, and what is going to happen next:

1) The 32-m antenna did not perform quite as we had hoped for. Matching it was no problem, but the optics was another matter... At 432 MHz the noise temperature of the receiver itself was about 33 K and the sky another 35 K, but we got only 6.5 dB excess noise on Cyg-A and a little over 1 dB moon noise. Assuming a theoretical gain of 40.9 dBi for the 32-meter aperture, this corresponds to a system temperature of 177 Kelvin or 2.1 dB NF !

The explanation is probably that the feed does not perform terribly well down at 432. As a result the aperture efficiency suffers due to excessive spillover while the ground noise pickup increases at the same time. Thus we had about 3 dB worse sensitivity on RX than we had hoped for, and probably about 1.5 dB less gain on TX. I'm afraid that we may have missed a number of 2-yagi, 50-watt class stations because of this. The smallest we worked were in the (2 yagi, 100 watt) or (1 very long yagi, 100 watt) class - which figures !

2) Once we had found that we were going to be sensitivity limited, we decided to back off on the TX power so as not to present an unbalanced link budget - no point in yelling louder than we had ears to hear... Settled for running the K2RIW in borderline class C (the drive was marginal) which caused it to run very cool, producing 350 very stable watts of output. We actually did not have to climb the antenna to re-tune during the whole 60 hours !

3) The tracking ran so smoothly that after a while we forgot that we were actually following a celestial body. The antenna controller has a built-in tracking function, but there is no moon tracking function. To solve this, Assar -LTA installed an open source ephemeris software (from NASA) on our main Sun server. This produced updated values for RA and DE every six seconds, and the real-time system was then called on to poke the updated values into the antenna controller command stream - the whole thing essentially amounted to starting a new tracking every six seconds and worked like a charm.

4) As reported earlier, our grand total is 151 complete QSOs and probably about 140 initials (I still haven't had the time to a proper count...). Unfortunately one or two NCs. Many European stations were worked on the rising or setting moon; a number of these were callsigns unfamiliar to me and probably tropo stations. We snagged SK4BX in this manner at Sunday moonset - the moon must have been halfway below their horizon as we completed!

5) QSLs are already beginning to arrive - thanks to everyone ! Please bear with us if you don't get a card in return right away. Because of my travel schedule I won't have time to start writing them out until mid-November - but they will be coming !

Please send QSLs to:

Gudmund Wannberg SM2BYA
Duvvagen 22
SE-981 37 Kiruna
Sweden

BTW, our locator was JQ 88 AD.

6) Our log will be in the next issue of the K2UYH 432+ Newsletter. We will NOT submit a ARRL EME contest entry, but maybe a checklog...

Thanks to all whom we worked and to all who tried for us for making this a great experience! If there is enough interest, we may consider repeating the exercise in one or two years' time - please let us know. SWL reports from all who copied us without getting through are particularly valuable.

73,

Gudmund SM2BYA