So, with a 900 Mhz yagi on the roof fed with heliax, I plugged in an SMA mixer (that I'm supposed to be building a 1296 transverter with) and dialed up my K5BCQ DDS signal generator up to 119.0 Mhz, and connected it to the TV.
Didn't quite work. I could tell there was something there that said W6ATN if I stared long and hard at the snowy screen. ;)
Made the following improvements.
1.) Moved the antenna higher. ;)
2.) I connected a cavity bandpass filter. Used my 8924c (and a mini-circuits directional coupler as an improvised return loss bridge) to put the "dip" right at 919.25. Dunno how much gain/loss/rejection it came out to, I'm still learning in that dept. ;) Either way, inserting this helped, noticeably.
3.) fished out a DEMI MMIC kit (10 bucks!!) from the bin, this one had a MAR-6. Soldered together and installed SMA connectors, and inserted between the Bandpass filter and the mixer.
Pretty good:
Here you can see the components: The water heater-lookin' thing is the BPF, MAR-6 preamp is floating in front of it with the green cable connected, and the mixer is floating off to the right with the three SMA's in a row. DDS VFO is on the bottom with the knob and the LCD that you can't read in this picture. Thats it!
Antenna: You can see I have my DVB-T dongle connected, used that to aim and peak.
