ET3AA
Ethiopian Amateur Radio Society
A big greeting from EARS!!
Concentrating hard during a Morse code lesson - the guest tutor, ZL1RS!
(Now, that REALLY is a case of "the blind, leading the blind" !!)
During a lighter moment - perhaps we had just learnt the abreviation "hi hi" !
These youngsters just soak up the radio theory ...
... all the guys and the YL!
After the serious stuff, it is time to operate on the HF bands.
"4Z5KZ, you are 5 and 9 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia"
It is a real team effort!
The club also have a VHF WX satellite receiver station. Sid (ET3SID) points
out the "Horn of Africa" on a live image just received from a NOAA satellite.
The club kindly gave me permission to use the ET3AA callsign for EME operation.
... so I set about building antennas in my defacto workshop - the dining room!
Out in the garden I installed a small mast under the watchful
eye of Mr Bayera, our security guard on duty that day.
Glueing the insulated, thru-boom elements in place.
Raising the array on the little mast to it's full height of 3M!
I decided to experiment and reduce feedline losses with a mashead POWER amp!
(No, we don't get much rain in Addis Ababa at this time of year!)
Finally the array is pointed at the "big cheese" and ready to operate.
2 x YU7EF EF0211B yagis in vertical polarisation, spaced 3.4M apart.
I have received incredably good signal reports for such a small EME setup.
Here is a close up of the "secret weapon"! A Mirage B3016 PA at the mast head!
You can just see the "big cheese" to the left of the PSU.
The basic station equipment : IC-706MK2g + PSU and a laptop with WSJT software.
A big thanks to the team at EARS for allowing me to use the ET3AA callsign!!
The Ethiopian Amateur Radio Society members are mostly students with very limited
financial means to improve their club, so I made a small plea via the Moon-Net
and Moon-Info e-mail reflectors. The response was most generous!
Please see the Donor's page!
If you want to keep up with the latest VHF and EME DXpeditions, here is a great site!
