I managed to hear some of the bigger stations about including OK1DFC, OE9ERC, ON7UN, G4CCH and probably a few others i could not positively identify!. All these stations have been on cw but have heard a few stations on JT65c also..

This is with the home made 1.8M dish, 12.5mm steel mesh and 15mm square ribs manually hammered into shape using a jig!
Feed was a 3 turn helical at this point.


OE9ERC the strongest JT65 station i heard..

OE9ERC on JT65

On CW the loudest station heard was OK1DFC...

OK1DFC

Dish

Dish Mount

I hvae done some Sun Noise measurements with this setup and i am getting around 4.3db of Sun Noise.

I need to do a bit more optimising yet!

Sun Noise measurement in SpectrumLab