Yeah thats always bad. I chose my XYL to fit in with my hobby grin

Of course height isn't as important for sat work than it is for
terrestrial. You can place small directive arrays on the rooftop and
steer them easily. I realize you are already Lindenblad bound but 2-3
element quads or helix antennas are still quite unobtrusive. Another
possibility is the egg beater type construction that with a simple
azimuth rotator will give you a few more dB gain than the "full" omni. I
personally went from a cross dipole to a Lindenblad in my first
satellite experiments with RS10. Was only running 3W SSB on 2m and it
was copyable on 10m down to 5 degrees elevation.

But back on the preamp front. I saw Alan's recommendation for the SSB
Electronics unit. No doubt there is a good reason for such a "high"
price, but I think I'd stick to building one from cheapish dual gate
FETs. Granted the NF isn't as low but with average rigs running 4-12dB
the improvement will still be significant. (Some rigs benefit from
changing PIN diode T/R switching to a coaxial relay. It really is
surprising) You may even want to do the maths of determining how much RX
signal you really need. A satellite is of course listening for signals
against a large amount of terrestrial noise whereas you are looking up
at essentially a cold RF sky. One of the reasons now doubt for the
disparity in ground station vs satellite RF output power.

Down East Microwave do a number of LNA's;

http://www.downeastmicrowave.com
and a 2m device;
http://www.downeastmicrowave.com/PDF/2mlna.PDF

I remember hearing good things about the company maybe 10 years ago.
They are a around $30-60 for RX only applications.

Sorry I ran out of time web searching. They aren't as prolific as I thought!

I apologize for waffling!

Cheers Bob



Rob Brown wrote:

Bob,
Thanks for the info.