Ghz Bands

摘要

Season's greetings. A prosperous new year to all readers of the GHz Bands column. Once again, it is time to reflect on another year on the microwave amateur bands. 2008 can hardly be described as a vintage year for propagation from and within the UK. As of mid November, there have been no large scale propagation openings like those of 2006 and many other years. Even so, activity levels have been good, if not exceptional, at times and contacts have been made over some remarkable distances and paths using reflection and scatter modes such as aircraft reflection and rain scatter. Equipment has continued tornimprove and the use of frequency locking, or at least regular checking against GPS disciplined source markers, has become a fact of life for many of us. The use of waterfall displays on software defined radios (SDR) is also now quite normal and it has become quite common to hear references to 'seeing' a weak signal rather than just hearing a weak carrier. Ironically, with the waterfall display, some of the need for frequency accuracy has been superseded as a weak signal appearing even tens of kHz off the agreed QSO frequency can quickly be spotted and netted. It will be interesting to see how SDR further infiltrates our microwave operatingrnover the next few years as more low cost SDR receivers and transceivers appear. I intend to cover the use of SDRs in amateur microwave operating in a future GHz Bands column.