Hi Jim,

I have one, and it works ok. Not the brightest panel lamp in the shack, but it was a whole lot better than nothing. I was eventually able to work AO-40 at apogee with it, a good preamp, and a 30" BBQ grill.

When you say "the mod", you need to be a bit more specific. That converter, probably more so than the others, has a long history of successful (and probably longer non-successful!) modifications, each with a different set of things being optimized for. Personally, I went for swapping out the local oscillator's crystal, moving the LO to 2100 mHz from the original 2278 mHz. (I had to also change a cap in the PLL to keep it in lock.) That moved our satellite band so that it comes out inside the original 200-400 mHz passband. It also makes the conversion math easy, and with an IF outside the Ham bands I use my all-mode scanner for the final leg in the receive chain so I can't mess up and transmit into the 2880's back side...

Other mods exist to get you an IF inside one of the Ham bands. Be careful to pick one where the uplink is well separated from the IF, and evaluate which is best for your situation, skill (I had help!), and test bench. For use with AO-51, well, that bird is LOUD compared to AO-40. You almost can't go wrong.

Good luck,

Greg.

From: hartwell@hartwell.net To: AMSAT-BB@amsat.org Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:26:35 -0800 Subject: [amsat-bb] drake 2880

Has any one used the Drake 2880 downconverter on the air.

I have 2 of them 1 I did the mod on and one that has not has any thing done to it.

Jim

K7UDG

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At 23:26 23/02/2010, you wrote:

Has any one used the Drake 2880 downconverter on the air.

Not been on the Sats for some time, but when AO40 was alive, I used the drake for the downlink. my experiences are shown at -

http://www.g4dmf.co.uk/dish/antenna.html

From what I gather, AO51 is a magnitude stronger than AO40 ever was. The Drake provided solid copy of Telemetry.

There are links in the article to various pictures I took, including a screen-shot of AO40 data on screen, and links to the mod pages for some of the many modifications done to that downconvertor.

RIP AO40... Praying for a " Battery Event " on that bird too!