On Sun, 21 Oct 2007 01:01:19 -0400, "Jimmie D"
wrote:

"Dave Typinski" wrote in message
.. .
Anyone have any ideas about what one might do with a television
receive-only (TVRO) antenna? The thing is 10' diameter and it's mine
for the price of dismantling it and hauling it out of the present
owner's back yard.

I'm thinking radio astronomy. Might be nice to make my own radio map
of the galaxy. I'm guessing that this would work okay somewhere
between 1 and 10 GHz... which means making a feed horn... which is
easy enough to do.

What else could I do with this antenna? Other than covering it in
polyethylene sheet to make a really big bird bath...
--
Dave Typinski
AJ4CO

I know of a couple of guys that took two of them, one for rx and one for tx,
tx was a microwave oven mgnetron. He and his frined talked to each other via
troposcatter. I do know if a maggie operates within a ham band or not but it
didnt matter too much for these guys because they didnt have a ticket
anyway.

Jimmie

I thought about magnetrons... but not for communication. My idea is
to set it up as a radar station to measure the distance to the Moon. A
microwave oven magnetron operates at 2450 MHz, which is right at the
upper edge of the 13cm ham band. Unfortunately, magnetrons produce a
really dirty, wide output. Worse, being right at the edge of the
band, half the RF energy would be out of band.

I don't know if one can re-tune a magnetron by the addition of
external components; I'd like to get the thing down to 2.42 GHz to put
the emission in the center of the 13cm band. There are such things as
tunable magnetrons; but, they aren't found in microwave ovens, which
means they won't likely be had for free.

That said, I'd sure like to look at the output from an oven magnetron
with a spectrum analyzer. Maybe the output isn't as dirty and wide as
I think it is.
--
Dave Typinski
AJ4CO