ICOM SHF Microwave Project for the 2.4 GHz & 5.6 GHz bands

In 2021, ICOM announced that they were developing a transceiver for the microwave bands. At the time, it seemed like a highly unusual but welcome development.

See the Addendum at the bottom of the post for updates...

In April of 2022, they announced more details. They write... "Under the theme of “ICOM SHF Project – Super High Frequency Band Challenge –”, we started to develop a new amateur radio available for use in the 2.4 GHz and 5.6 GHz bands.

Icom engineers are working hard to research and develop a number of never cleared challenges within the SHF band, such as large cable loss and higher frequency stability requirements. The ultimate goal is to bring it to the market as a new radio product. Icom is striving to bring to you a new era in fun and possibilities of an SHF band amateur radio, which to date has had high technical and equipment hurdles to overcome, and we hope to make these bands more attractive and active so that anyone can easily operate on them. We are developing an epoch-making SHF band amateur radio that no one has never imagined before."

The microwave radio is essentially a box that this designed to be fitted at the top of a mast or roof of a house. This will keep any coax losses to an absolute minimum.

New 2380km record on 2.4 GHz between Australia and New Zealand

 

The Tasman Sea is an area where there are regular tropospheric ducting openings between Australia and New Zealand. On the 13th of December 2020, Hayden VK7HH and Richard VK7ZBX portable on an elevated location in Tasmania made successful SSB contacts with Nick ZL1IU in New Zealand on 144 MHz, 432 MHz and 1296 MHz.

As the tropo prediction map from F5LEN suggested, the 2380 km path from New Zealand to Tasmania was indeed open.

The really amazing contact however came at 05:58 UTC when there was a successful contact between VK7HH and ZL1IU on 2.4 GHz!

The contact was completed by using CW (morse code) as the signals were too weak for a SSB (voice) contact.

This 2380 km contact was a new Australian tropo record for 2.4 GHz breaking the previous record between VK4OX and ZL1AVZ by some 60kms.

27th Jan 2011 - 2317.5kms - VK4OX  - ZL1AVZ

A video of the contact is shown below. It starts at where the 2.4 GHz contact takes place although you can of course go back to the start to see the site location in Tasmania and the contacts on the lower VHF bands.

If you look at the video at 9:45, you can see that they managed to complete a contact on 144 MHz SSB with just one-watt which gives an indication of just how good the conditions were.

It was also nice to see that in a digital age, CW still has a place for very weak signal contacts!

Other paths???... Obviously the one constraint with making contacts on 2.4 GHz are the low number of stations on the band. This limits experiments with other sea paths which might show some suprising results.

The one that springs to mind for me is the sea path from Ireland/UK down to the Canary Islands.

Back in July of 2020, EI2FG and EA8CXN managed to complete a  successful contact on 1296 MHz over a 2714 km path.

What about 2.4 GHz?

As far as I can see, the current IARU Region-1 record on 2.4 GHz is between Malta and Israel.

Band Propagation Call a Loc Call b Loc Mode Date Distance
2,32 GHz TR 9H1GB JM75FU 4X1RF KM72LS CW 2018-07-22 1914 kms

Time for a new 2.4 GHz record in IARU Region-1???

Links...

1) IARU Region-1 records for 2.4 GHz

2) Australian VHF, UHF & Microwave records

New 434 MHz to 2.4 GHz Transmit Converter

The new OSCAR 100 satellite in geostationary orbit has a downlink in the 10 GHz band and an uplink at 2.4 GHz.

I was looking through the most recent edition of the Dutch Kingdom Amateur Radio Society  magazine and I noticed this transmit upconverter...

The price seems pretty modest for what it does although I don't know anything about its performance.

From what I understand, something like 2 watts into a 2.5-3 metre dish or 10-20 watts for a 1-1.5 metre dish is required for an SSB signal for the uplink at 2.4 GHz.

For more information, go to http://www.dxpatrol.pt/