10GHz-rain scatter (reception) at river Danube 05/2010
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While a short vacation i was able to give my 10 GHz equipment a test "by the way". We could
rent a small weekend hut with a gret view down to the river. The picture above was made on another
day while we had much better weather. This weekend it was raining all the time.
As to see at this shot, our domicile had a small sunroom, that was great to do my experiments all the time without disturbing the rest of the family.
The station could stay all vacation long and -to be honest- i did not expect to have spectacular experiences or QSOs. I have to say, that this
QTH is not very elevated. In other words: It's located in deep valey of tears, so it's not the ideal place for microwave operation...
Already with my first trial i was disabused concerning that opinion. When tuning the band i received a very strong, but extremely scattered signal, that i could clearly hear along the (visible) horizon. I first thought about some incident, but then the signal began to key a callsign. It was the beacon DB0ANU, located at the telecommunication tower of Ansbach. Ansbach lies to the north, my receiving direction was to the south. I could not directly set my antenna to Ansbach because there is a big hill with a wall of more than 10m elevation directly beginning in back of the hut. The distance between my QTH at the river and Ansbach is about 100km. The signal strength was up to S8 at the main reflection point. Without rainscatter i would not have been able to hear anything of that beacon.
After tasting blood, i gave it some more tries and was lucky to receive two more beaons: DB0FGB (129km) @ Schneeberg (Fichtelgebirge) and DL0WY (135km) @ Wendelstein.
Already with my first trial i was disabused concerning that opinion. When tuning the band i received a very strong, but extremely scattered signal, that i could clearly hear along the (visible) horizon. I first thought about some incident, but then the signal began to key a callsign. It was the beacon DB0ANU, located at the telecommunication tower of Ansbach. Ansbach lies to the north, my receiving direction was to the south. I could not directly set my antenna to Ansbach because there is a big hill with a wall of more than 10m elevation directly beginning in back of the hut. The distance between my QTH at the river and Ansbach is about 100km. The signal strength was up to S8 at the main reflection point. Without rainscatter i would not have been able to hear anything of that beacon.
After tasting blood, i gave it some more tries and was lucky to receive two more beaons: DB0FGB (129km) @ Schneeberg (Fichtelgebirge) and DL0WY (135km) @ Wendelstein.