There was an earth-moon-earth contest at the Haswell, CO site run by the Deep Space Exploration Society. This was a contest involving bouncing signals off the moon and making contacts with other people doing the same thing. Very cool! First time I got to hear my own echo come back off the moon.
They ran on the 1296MHz Ham band, using their massive 60′ dish and about 370W of transmit power.
This massive beast would have about 46dB gain on 1.296GHz!
Here’s some neat shots of the various feeders and slip rings on the dish. There used to a be a 3 1/8″ coaxial feed with an insanely beefy right angle slip ring. There were also two wave-guides and a large tube coming down through the middle of the pedestal which had dozens of rings and contacts for the dish controls. Most of this stuff is now un-used, replaced with jumper cables with slack and 1/2″ heliax coax since the dish can’t rotate more than 360 degrees anyway. The dish struts also entirely fiberglass which is pretty neat.
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