New remote station ready for use!

Again a very long quiet period here but no worries, lots have been happening though I've felt there's really no time for anything. One very important thing has gained some attention and leaped a major step ahead before winter, that is the remote operations station on top of the tall house of the housing company where we used to live (that's news also since last writing, we've sold our flat and bought a house! :)

Rotatable VHF-UHF antenna setup of the new remote controlled station

The VHF-UHF rotatable antenna array consists of a Tonna heavy-duty 9-element yagi for 144 MHz, a Tonna 21-element yagi for 432 MHz, Tonna 35-element yagi for 1296 MHz and a Aerial SBFA antenna modified to 2320 MHz. On very top of the tower there is a Diamond VX-4000 triband (144, 432 and 1296 MHz) vertical antenna.

The antenna setup has now been tested for real at least on ä144 and 432 MHz, as there was extremely good tropo conditions over the sea few weeks ago, and I operated very good contacts to the baltic countries, Czech republic, Denmark and Sweden  with the new setup and I was extremely happy finally to take part to the sudden conditions enhancements.

I'm gathering a info web of the remote controlled station and I promise to publish more data and pictures of how everything is made. I might say it is quite handsom setup :)

There's also the stationary tower up at the roof which carries big wheel omni antennas for 144 and 432 MHz, 1296 MHz versio of the 'big' wheel is still unfinished as it requires some kind of radome, a discone for all-band monitoring and few microwave link antennas to connect Espoonlahti water tank, Juhanila TSF site and our new house to the network.

Stationary tower up at the roof with general monitoring antennas
and microwave antennas for internet connections

Remote switching cabinet

The actual radio hardware inside the elevator room has two cabinets, one for cable intake & shielding and the other is actually the radio cabinet. The upped cabinet has the coaxial cables from the antennas termnated to a lightning protector block (hopefully to protect radios at the cable end!) Next to the Yaesu G-1000C rotator is the Microbit Webswitch for remote antenna rotator setup an relay control. Plan is to make the radio equipment power supply to be remote controlled to wake up the station when needed.

The first phase of the remote operated equipment;

• Icom IC-706 mk2 G for 144 and 432 MHz operations
• Icom IC-R7100 + SDR-IQ
• Icom PCR-1000 receiver
• Funcubedongle Pro
• PC running Windows XP to control the SDR's and to perform other tasks.

I'm looking forward to replacing the IC-706 with Kenwood TS-2000 which I have in storage, but there are some restrictions how it should be used etc., the mobile control panel is a bit too small for full-feature HF+VHF+UHF flagship to operate.