The Jamesburg dish is a 30 meter diameter satellite dish antenna complex at rural Jamesburg, near Carmel, California, that was put into service by AT&T in 1969. AT&T sold the facility a few years ago. Recently it has been made available to a group of local amateur radio operators who are using this opportunity to make some Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) contacts.
The dish had a number of technical problems, electrical and mechanical, that had to be resolved before it could be put back into any kind of operation. A large number of volunteers has spent a large amount of time and effort, whenever access was available, to work through these issues and bring the dish back to life. I have recently become involved and played a small part in the process over the last few weeks.
On March 3, 2007 enough of the problems were resolved to make the first contacts using the dish for amateur radio EME on a frequency of 1296 MHz. Over the weekend 10's of contacts were made, bouncing signals off of the moon to hams with stations over wide ranges of the earth from Japan to Eastern Europe.
The future of this facility is somewhat uncertain, but we are grateful for the opportunity we have had, and plan to continue to use and improve the facility as long as we are welcome.
I have put up this page here, merely as a place to easily post some of the pictures I have taken at the site. There is another page describing some of the dish's history and describing some of the recent events in bring it back to life. There are many more pictures in galleries on those pages.
The Main Jamesburg dish web pages are located here:
JamesburgDish.org Site
Here are some galleries of pictures of the Jamesburg dish site that I have taken.