For many months I had been watching for stations from Oceania via EME. From Germany contacts to New Zealand for example are possible only in a small time window in which the moon is visible from both locations simultaneously. At my location mountains and buildings to the east reduce this window even further to a possible slot of abt. 20 minutes. In addition there is much groundnoise noise at those low elevation angles at moonrise.  So bad conditions at all.

The moon was in a favorable position on this holy evening, December 24. Moonrise was around 19 o’clock and a very little activity from european stations. Watching the N0UK-EME-chat I saw that ZL2MQ from RF80km called CQ on 144.133 MHz. Let’s see if he could be copied with my single 14 element antenna. And yes, today everything fits: no big guns from Europe were on, low ground noise and also Faraday played along. To make the story short: Five minutes later the QSO with Dave was in the log and thus not only a new DXCC on 2m, but with 18.298 km also a new ODX. What a nice Christmas present and an evening to remember!

Yesterday the 1296 MHz EME-Project reached a new milestone: After mounting a waterprooved box with preamp and protection relais close to the Septum feed during the past days I tried to listen off the moon for the first time. I asked Dan, HB9Q, if he could transmit some minutes for me with his 10m dish. And so he did. Holding the feed out of the basements window, pointing to the moon and HB9Q was copied easily with -26 dB in JT65c mode. Whow, what a feeling! Now I’m waiting for better weather for further setups. 

There was a lot of work to be done in the garden during the last weeks: No, not only mowing gras, but also a larger hole had to be excavated and filled with concrete. Then mounting a stable metal pole on it, a rotor and, of course, another antenna. An 8m long 12 element DK7ZB Yagi was the choice, 14.1 dBd gain. Not much at all for a 2m EME system, but we’ll see what’s possible. 

On Saturday afternoon everything was ready to go for the first test. The automatic tracking system worked perfect and turned the antenna exactly to the moon, who was almost in the south. Just only 30 degrees elevation and almost 2 dB additional pathloss – not very promising. Will this be enough to hear someone?

It was enough! UA4AQL was easily detected in the waterfall, calling cq in JT65 mode. One periode calling and he came back to me – whow, what a good feeling! After this initial contact, four more QSO’s followed with LZ2FO, RX1AS, OH4LA and F4DJK.

Listed details are here.