Well, not really. The signals come from the Earth – but they’re bounced off the Moon!

After making up new feeder cables to replace the long and cobbled together set I had been using for earlier tests, I was ready in time for the ARRL EME contest weekend. The first thing to do was another Sun noise test, just to make sure the system was still working, which it was.

You can see from the trace on the right hand side that I was getting about 5dB of Sun noise above “cold sky”; slightly better than the previous setup.

Once the Moon was up I was ready to see if I could detect any signals. I was monitoring the HB9Q logger website to see who was on, and to find the frequencies to look at. It was not long before I had decoded the first signal.

The decodes pane shows a couple of decodes of OK1VUM calling CQ, at 2018 and 2022. It’s a fairly big station with a 32 x 9 element home made Yagi array, and about 600W of power. These decodes are at a low signal level and not at all easy to see in the waterfall! Note that the frequency shown (437.070) is not the radio dial frequency, it’s set in the software, and since the rig is not controlled by the software I don’t use that. The dial frequency was 432.084MHz. The extract below shows where those decodes are:

They are in the 20:18 and 20:22 time periods.

The next station is slightly easier to see:

This station, HB9Q, is big with a 15m dish and 1kW of power. If I couldn’t see this one I was going to have problems. However, it is easy to see in the waterfall display.

The next station is weaker, but still clear in the waterfall:

That’s OK1DFC, using an 8m dish with up to 1.2kW of power on 70cm. Another big station!

Back to HB9Q now, after I had tweaked the spectrum display, where the HB9Q signals now show clearly:

OK1VUM, the first station I had seen, was still on and visible here (a single decode in the 22:20 slot), along with HB9Q at the left of the waterfall and spectrum.

The final station was one of the early US stations to come on.

This one is a whopper! No marks needed to show the signal. It was so strong I could even (just) hear it! NC1I was working many stations. The page at qrz.com shows the 48 (6 x 8) Yagi array, each 15 elements. Very impressive! (My antenna is a single 15 element Yagi.)