Fall 2003 Issue

Imagine a ham radio band 500 MHz wide! That is what you get at X-band with a Technician class or higher license. Your antenna requirements won’t bug your neighbors. They would probably mistake your dish for something that might pull in satellite television signals. Little do they know that your effective radiated power is around 2000 watts! (That’s 20 watts into a 20-dB gain parabolic reflector.)

Your neighbors will rarely find you playing X-band around the house. More than likely, you’ll be out on a hill or along an oceanfront, beaming your microwaves hundreds of miles away with ease. The latest equipment is literally “plumb and play,” so coming up to 10,000 MHz is as easy as adding a transverter to your existing 10-meter or 2-meter multimode rig.

The 10-GHz X-band extends from 10,000 MHz up to 10,500 MHz. At the top of the band, near 10,451 MHz, are satellite allocations. Below that are point-to-point amateur fast-scan television links. At the bottom of the band and in the middle of the band, several hundred megahertz exist for microwave point-to-point FM links. With 50- to 75-mile direct-path shots, 10,000 MHz is an ideal band for using our spectrum to the fullest (use it or lose it) and reusing exact frequency pairs, because multiple microwave links rely on precise dish-pointing techniques, which all but eliminate any same-frequency interference to other links crisscrossing a specific geographic area!

For X-band microwave enthusiasts looking for a big “turn on” when operating on frequencies higher than that of their home microwave oven, nothing beats the excitement down at 10.368.1 MHz, which falls within the weak-signal portion of the band.

“One hundred milliwatts beyond a 600-mile path was not too bad, huh?” comments Wayne Yoshida, KH6WZ, with the San Bernardino Microwave Society, Inc., a non-profit amateur technical organization dedicated to the advancement of communications above 1,000 MHz (see <http://www.ham-radio. com/sbms/>).

“I had my 5-watt, 10,000-MHz microwave system alongside my 160-watt, 2-meter SSB mobile, and 10,000 MHz was easily out-talking 2 meters!” comments Kent Britain, WA5VJB, editor of the North Texas Microwave Society’s newsletter, “Feedpoint” (see <http://www.ntms.org>).

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Byron, KC6YNG, “listens”
for the 10-GHz beacon 80
miles away.