Deep Space Exploration Society
Colorado — Radio Astronomy at the Speed of Light
Bill Miller, DSES VP, has written a great report on the DSES Open House that was held on October 5, 2024. It was a very successful event with over 100 attendees enjoying the new building and other activities.
Click here for the report: 2024 Open House.
There is also a video provided by Mike K0FYR: 2024 Open House
The 30 Foot Dish and Pedestal have been safely removed from Ignacio, CO.
Read the progress reports here: 30 Foot Dish Progress Report and Unloading the Dish. Thanks to Elaine K0ARR for the excellent writeup and photos.
Paul NO0T took this video of the dish being removed from the Pedestal: Dish Removal
For more information about the project, and to make a donation read this post: Save the 30 Foot Dish Project
Next, the Dish and Pedestal components will be unloaded at the DSES Haswell, CO site. Plans are to install the Dish in the Spring of 2025.
The Deep Space Exploration Society (DSES), a 501 C(3) non-profit (K0PRT) is working to save a 30-foot EME dish which was built and used by Bruce K0YW who passed away last year. The 30-foot Kennedy EME dish is located in a remote area of SW Colorado near Ignacio and is scheduled to be torn down for metal scrap this July so that the property can be sold by Bruce’s XYL.
DSES is trying to raise donations to help pay for a crane and then transport the antenna 330 miles to their location near Haswell Colorado in SE Colorado and reinstall the dish. All donations received will help fund this dish removal, which includes crane rental, transportation, lodging and any associated cost in the reassembly process and re-mounting this dish back on the 25-foot tower secured to a large concrete foundation at the DSES Plishner Site in Southeast Colorado.
No amount is too small and DSES really appreciates your support. The plan is to rebuild and reinstall the dish late this year or early in 2025.
Bill Miller has provided the following report on Plishner site visits from Dec 2023 to Feb 2024. In this report he covers recent work on the new building as well as work performed on other site visits.
Read the report here: Dec, Jan, Feb trips to the Plishner Radio Site
An update on the progress of our DSES building project. Our DSES Vice President and Project Manager, Bill Miller, has spent many hours and has made many trips down to the Plishner Site near Haswell Colorado to make this project happen. After many delays, some due to COVID, in finding contractors for concrete, plumbing, and electrical as well as building manufacturers to provide a 60-foot by 30-foot structure, DSES has finally made some progress. We still have many hours of interior/exterior work and antenna towers to place before we can move our current operations from the existing communications trailer and the underground bunker. This future work will still require many trips and hours on site to complete these tasks. We hope our local Colorado DSES members will be able to provide some help in completing these projects. DSES will provide dates and times of these trips so members can plan their time at the Plishner Site. A big thank you to Bill Miller for taking on this project and to those other members who were able to assist him over the past few months.
Myron Babcock
President/Treasurer
DSES
Photos courtesy of Glenn Davis. Text by Bill Miller.
On Friday afternoon October 14, 2022, we prepared the 60-foot dish antenna for the weekend’s Moonbounce communications operations in the ARRL EME contest.
Glen Davis updated the tracking software, checked the callibration of the mount and helped as ground crew and photographer. Meanwhile Ray Uberecken and Bill Miller climbed the scaffold and changed the feed from the 437 Mhz antenna to the 1296Mhz antenna. They also installed Ray’s 180 watt amplifier at the antenna feed point and checked the system reception from Ray’s Calhan residence beacon.
On Sunday October 2, 2022 Ray Uberecken, Dan Layne and Gary Agranat climbed on to the 60-foot dish antenna to measure the dish diameter, the distance from the dish center to the feed, and the bore alignment. This verified the original geometry specifications continue to be valid to at least within a quarter of an inch.
The original plan for the day was to also install the 1296 MHz feed at the focus, for the upcoming ARRL EME contest. However, the wind gusts increased, as was anticipated from the forecast. The feed changeout was therefore postponed.
Photos by Gary Agranat
Deep Space Exploration Society will support the Japanese OMOTENASHI Cube Sat Moon lander, by attempting to receive and record its UHF downlink signals enroute to the Moon and after landing. OMOTENASHI is a project created by the Japanese space agency JAXA Amateur Radio Club, and is one of ten Cube Sat satellites on the NASA Artemis 1 lunar mission.
Several hours after Artemis 1 boosts from an Earth parking orbit to a transfer orbit to the Moon, OMOTENASHI should deploy. After 6 days the OMOTENASHI will separate into an orbiter and lander, and the lander will make a hard landing on the Moon. The lander is designed to survive and then transmit signals.
OMOTENASHI & EQUULEUS: the tiny spacecraft onboard the world’s most powerful rocket – Cosmos
OMOTENASHI (in Japanese): mission movie
Lewis Putnam and Glenn Davis worked at the Plishner antenna site on Monday November 1. Lewis wrote this trip report to describe what they accomplished. The major reason for the work trip was to evaluate the mount pointing errors after the replacement of 1420 feed.
http://dses.science/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/TripReport_JGD_Nov1-21.pdf
Text & pictures by Bill Miller.
On Tuesday 12/08 Ray Uberecken and Bill Miller traveled to the Plishner site. We found that the gate chain lock was not properly attached to the post and could be removed without unlocking it
We replaced two of the coaxial cables running from the dish pedestal control deck to the upper deck just below the dish. These cables had stretched from their own weight and from the elevation rotation of the dish. As a consequence the center pin pulled out from the mating connector, losing the conductivity. We added to the cable a loop over the elevation axis. Ray added a feedthrough connector attachment on the ceramic slip ring collar, in order to remove the rest of the hanging stress on the wires, and he re-added the swivel joints below that. This arrangement completely eliminates the cables traveling up and down thru the collar as the elevation is changed, and this also virtually eliminates the coaxial cable wrap in the control deck area. We redressed all of the cables there with tie wraps and tape to get them out of the way of personnel in the deck and to remove the mechanical strain on all the cables.
At the top deck we removed the AC extension cord, which had been temporarily installed to a power amplifier at the feed for EME. Its cord insulation might not have survived the winter, and the uninsulated cord could potentially short out to the structure. A more permanent and reliable 120 volt power distribution is needed to the feed point.
We also re-dressed all the wires and coax cable in the upper deck. We reused the pipe grommets as a weather shield for the cables going down thru the azimuth axes collar to the control deck level.
We then placed a ladder on the mount and proceeded up to the dish surface. There we continued to remove the 120 volt extension cord, and we inspected the surface and the support. This is a wide angle shot of the scene in the dish. It does give a sense of the surreal feeling of the view from there.
We inspected the attachments and connections. We discovered that the grounding cable connection on one of the legs leading to the focal box had been cut off. Furthermore, the wave guide that is attached at the dish structure is not electrically attached to the focal point box. Therefore the only ground to protect from RF, lightning, or static is the coax shield and the low voltage control cable ground wire. This may be one of the causes of failures in the electronics. We should retrofit to provide a good DC ground connection between the feed box at the focal point to the pedestal.
We also wanted to know how the fiber glass supports for the feed are adjusted.
The fiber glass supports are badly weathered after 60 years in the open. We should derive a plan to rework the fiberglass surface, for the next time we rent a bucket lift to work on them.
Once we had inspected the dish, we tipped the dish down to the service elevation, donned climbing harnesses, and climbed the scaffold tower. We removed the 1296 MHz feed and installed the 408MHz antenna using Ray’s quick-change mount. This only took about an hour where before the process could take as much as half a day.
We also reworked the connector attachments in the electronics box. Ray then reattached the additional 20db amplifier, and checked everything out with the TDR and Spectrum analyzer. He reattached the cables in the pedestal to connect the correct coax lines to the Comm. Trailer.
Bill replaced the broken window in the back of the comm. trailer with the new one he purchased from Kent Glass and sealed it with RTV. This provides a much clearer view of the dish from the trailer.
We parked the dish, turned off all the equipment, locked the site and left for the day.