Hannes Fasching, OE5JFL, of Braunau am Inn, Austria, has demonstrated that you don’t need a huge antenna system to operate EME (moonbounce) successfully. Fasching fired up for the October 22-23 weekend of the ARRL EME Contest, using a small horn antenna on 1.2 GHz.

“Because of other commitments I had only a few hours to be QRV in the first part of the ARRL EME Contest,” he said in a Moon-Net post on October 26. “As tests with my recently built 23-centimeter horn antenna were promising, I decided to give it a try to work some stations.” Fasching placed the horn on his balcony with an 80 W solid-state amplifier.

Operating WSJT, he logged contacts with Switzerland, Russia, Germany, and the Czech Republic. He also heard stations in the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, and Italy on digital modes and in the UK, Czech Republic, Denmark, and Italy on CW.

Fasching, who also has a 7.3-meter homemade dish, has uploaded recordings of some EME signals to his website, along with the results of tests with his small system.