Flea Market in Frederikssund and Test equipment.

 This was the first larger arrangement I have attended since the corona closed down everything social, sort of.

I am still glad that this was an outdoor event.

It was good to meet some old and new friends. I had been talking to a local on the QO100 satellite, and finally we got to meet in person.

I did not bring too much back home, as the house is quite full of stuff. What I did get, was some good quality attenuators (10W/10GHz/10dB) and an older frequency counter capable of 1300MHz.

The counter has been under test a while, testing the reading of my 10MHz GPSDO. After close to 2 days (warming up the reference oscillator) it looks like the reference frequency oscillator is 2Hz off on 10MHz. Not too bad for HF/VHF, but insufficient for UHF and microwaves. The variation with temperature (there is a simple OCXO inside) seems to be less than 1Hz after warm-up, so stability is quite good.

Reference frequency alignment is in my future. 

The counter does have a 1MHz reference frequency input, so it will also be possible to lock the reference to a GPSDO for the best possible stability and accuracy.

Microwave Day in Horsens, Denmark.

In the past week end I went to the Microwave Day in Horsens, Denmark, a one-day event of talk and testing of microwave gear.
I did not bring any gear myself, as I decided rather late to go there, and I am just beginning doing something in the microwaves, mostly due to the QO-100 satellite.
About 30 people attended, and most were experienced microwavers, so I took the opportunity to draw a bit on their experience, and see if I could get some new ideas.

There was test equipment to measure small feed horn antennas for dish antennas, and the possibility of measuring power and noise figure on microwave bands up to 10 GHz.

If they repeat this event (next year?) I may have some equipment to have tested.

In the afternoon some groups went out to nearby hills and tested their equipment in the field.

It was good to get to meetings like this, meeting other people who have already made the first (or many more) steps in the field.

Time to start getting some stuff, more than the simple modified satellite LNB for QO-100. I will need some for the home, and some for portable use, going to nearby (or not so nearby) hills ... and the small simple equipment for local tests.

Aditionally there was a show of a - not too expensive - GPSDO which has been used at the oldest, still running VHF/UHF/microwave beacon, OZ7IGY. It can be programmed from very low frequencies, up to 200MHz, and the price is half of what I have seen for comparable devices.