I’ve been struggling with running my radio cables through the wall. For many years I drilled some holes in the frame that held our cat door, but as you can see below, we stopped using the cat door. With the recent bout of horrible wildfire smoke here in Seattle I was forced to remove the cat door and hole up inside and was unable to use my radio. That prompted me to finally get up the courage to drill a hole in the wall of my house.

The performance of my satellite downlink station is nowhere near as good as I would like. I been doing some various troubleshooting measures to try and figure out what is going on. In my previous post, you can see some of my explorations about antenna tuning. In this post I took my first pass at exploring the feedline situation. It’s been up for at least five years and wanted to make sure nothing untoward had happened to it.

For my satellite ground station I built an antenna from the plans by WA5VJB http://www.wa5vjb.com/references/Cheap%20Antennas-LEOs.pdf

I originally built a 7 element 70cm antenna. But then added on a two element 2m one. While I had tuned the 70cm antenna, it was tuned a little too low after the second cut to shorten the driven element. But it passed, just barely.

While attaching the new antenna to the old, I got frustrated smacking the darn thing into everything and hacked off the end, converting it to a 5 element in short order. With years of experience under my belt I have learned that anger is not a great engineering design philosophy.

I’ve been slowly working towards building a satellite uplink and downlink station for years. I have finally reached a point where I finished building the station and have Receive some signals.

The performance is rather abysmal, I still have a fair amount of work to do.