Some QO-100 trials

This weekend i did some new trials with QO-100. In the picture you can see parts of setup i used. This time the TX setup was purely classic. You can see it in the grey box in the foto below. FT-817 on 2m as IF followed by an upconverter made from some old UMTS measurement equipment block (silver box in the middle). It does dual upconversion with high-side LO. The LO consist of an ADF4351 each (the two smaller boards above the converter). The reference is a 96MHz OCXO of G8ACE design (left of the PLL boards). The converter block generates up to 200mW on 2.4GHz. I drive a WLAN PA (black box) that probably generates 1W. And the final PA is a MRF21030 PA (on the big heat sink on the right). It provides about 10W in SSB. The antenna is my 60cm offset dish with the DJ7GP patch (the one that has the round patch element). Left to the grey TX dish you can see a black 40cm camping dish with Octagon LNB and TCXO modification. But instead i used the BATC websdr this time. The reason is the amount of cable i currently have. I use 3 power supplies (28V, 13.8V, 5V). Reducing the number of required cables is one of the next steps. However i was pleased to do some nice QSO.

QO-100 setup