Club member Andy G0FVI has had an article published in Scatterpoint, the UK microwave group newsletter. The article is about building parabolic dish feeds for the bands 23cm and 13cm using minimal tooling.

Andy decided early in 2019 to have a go at EME on 23/13 cm plus putting together a station to work through QO100, the first geostationary amateur satellite. Constructing dish feeds for these frequencies normally involves finding someone with a lathe to accurately cut metal to precise dimensions. Searching around for a local firm to do the cutting did not yield any takers despite many of these firms advertising ‘small jobs undertaken’. A method was developed to construct dish feeds from copper and brass using a jigsaw with fine metal cutting blades. An SM6FHZ patch for 23cm was successfully constructed together with a dual band feed for QO100.

Andy is happy to help any other local hams wishing to construct similar feeds.