Daily Archives: 1/29/2008

Trying to record some of VO-52…

Tuning for the Doppler shift on VO-52 is a bit challenging, particularly when you have an antenna in one hand. You all are probably bored with this stuff, but here’s my evening passes recording. It was pretty nice: you can hear WD4FU, the Gainesville, FL station for the University of Florida radio club. It’s the first time I remember hearing a Florida station, and my Maidenhead gridsquare calculator lists its distance at about 3800km. Nice. I am still having difficulty knowing exactly how to adjust the tuning to get natural sounding SSB, but a few more passes, and I bet it will be second nature.

Oh… Did I not tell you what VO-52 was? It’s an Indian amateur radio satellite that carries a linear transponder: it maps a segment of the 70cm spectrum on its uplink to a portion of the 2m spectrum for its downlink. The nice thing is that it can carry several different conversations at once, either in SSB or in CW.

VO-52, with lots of doppler…

Weird Sound Generator

Here’s a link for Tom: a kit for the Weird Sound Generator. Unlike many of these things, I actually found the variety and quality of sounds produced by this thing to actually be pretty darned interesting. It might be fun to build one of these and work on your own soundtrack for Return to the Forbidden Planet. Check it out:

Weird Sound Generator

Here’s an MP3 of the example sounds you can make with this gadget.

New Radio on AO-51

Well, last night I went and programmed in the various doppler shifted frequencies for AO-51 into the new FT-817, and then this morning worked the morning pass half duplex with Leo, W7JPI and W6GMT. The recording of course doesn’t include my own voice, but the audio quality was really good. You can occasionally hear a beep tone, that’s where I hit the up switch on the mic to move to the next pre-programmed Doppler setting. Very nice.

AO-51, Morning of Jan 29, 2008 with the FT-817