Saturday night, we tested our new tracking algorithm. We want to characterize the influence of the current AZ and EL offsets. These offsets convert AZ and EL values coming out of the resolver into absolute positions. These values are critical.
During a Moon tracking, Guy operated EME communications at 5GHz. Experiment started at 20:30 pm UTC. The quality of the transmissions give us an idea on these offsets.
Now, it’s hard to conclude. At some position of pb8 the EME transmission was ok (35dB SNR), sometimes we lost 6dB, even more. One explanation is to say that we are tracking on the edage the the Moon disk, and a very small error could have a huge impact on signal loss. Another hypothesis is that theses offsets are not constant and they depend on the current position of pb8 (worst case scenario). We have to think about new experiments to challenge these first results.