Our Ground Station
Ground Station on the Roof of N4AFL's House
The antenna assembly is located on the roof and consists of a 8 foot tall Glen Martin RT-832 tower and two second hand KLM beams (a 2 m 14-element 2m-14C and a 70 cm 40-element 432-40CX). The antennas are mounted on fiberglass cross booms connected to a reconditioned Yaesu G-5400B elevation rotator at the top of 10 feet of 2 inch diameter mast (the azmuth rotator is mounted on the tower). The antennas are connected to 2 m and 70 cm receiver preamps (SSB SP-2000/SP-7000) which are mounted on the side of the tower. About 40 feet of Aircom Plus coax is used for connecting the preamps to the shack inside the house. The tower is anchored with carriage bolts to two 2 * 5 foot boards made of pressure treated lumber (one board is located on each side of the peak of the roof). Each board is fastened to the roof with lag bolts that have been directly screwed into three pairs of roof rafters.
The shack consists of a second-hand Yaesu FT-736R transceiver, a 2 m Mirage B-5016G power amplifier and a PacComm PSK-1/NB96 packet radio TNC for decoding the 1200-baud AFSK downlink. A Radio Shack 33-memory Tone Dialer will be used for DTMF uplink control. Computerized tracking control is provided with a Kansas City Tracker Tuner card and WiSP software running on Windows 95.
