Signal Log: Late August, and the Receiver Upgrade We Keep Not Buying

I keep the equipment log because Dee and Priya are both bad at it and somebody has to be able to answer “when did we last touch the feed” without guessing. Publishing it was Dee’s idea, not mine — I was against it for a while, mostly because I didn’t think anyone would care about a hardware maintenance log. I’ve been wrong about that before. If you’re new to the project, the about page has context on what the hardware is pointed at.

Uptime. The dish was down eleven hours over four days this month — once for weather (nothing dramatic, just enough wind that leaving the feed exposed felt stupid), once because I finally swapped the primary LNA for a spare after noticing our noise floor had crept up about half a dB over six weeks. That’s a small number and it still mattered; a lot of what looks like “a weak signal day” around here turns out to be “the front end degraded slightly and nobody noticed for a month.”

The LNA swap. We’re running the SAW-filtered unit tuned to the hydrogen line at the feed — same class of hardware we point people to when they ask what to start with, though ours has been modified enough at this point that it’s not really stock anymore. The spare that went in is a wideband unit, not SAW-filtered, which is a real tradeoff — we’re more exposed to nearby interference until the primary gets serviced and goes back in. Worth knowing if anyone’s cross-referencing our data against this window and sees more noise than usual.

Receiver upgrade, still not bought. We’ve said for a while that the unit currently in the chain is doing fine and isn’t the bottleneck — that’s still true. What’s actually aging out is redundancy: we have exactly one working spare receiver, and if it fails during a maintenance window on the primary, we lose data, not just convenience. That’s the upgrade we keep not buying. If you were already going to pick up an SDR receiver for your own setup, doing it through our equipment picks is the most direct way this project sees any benefit from it — we’re not going to pretend that’s not partly why this paragraph exists.

Next log in a few weeks, sooner if something actually breaks.