brainwagon

Well, I’m trying, but I’m finding that I need a third hand to work satellite handheld. Maybe some kind of tripod ala K7AGE would free up my hands enough to be able to be a little more calm. I managed to get my call out, but I failed to copy the responder’s call properly, so this doesn’t count as my first satellite QSO. I’ll probably try again in 90 minutes on the last pass of the day.

The calls I think I copied were KI6IUJ, Laguna Beach, WD8PFS, DM12, KE5GFS and KC9ELU, EM79. There were other calls, and maybe I got these wrong, but that’s what I heard.
Maybe I’ll try to record the next pass.

Addendum: In retrospect, I’m pretty sure it had to be KI6IUJ who responded to me. He responded with only his gridsquare, which I copied as DM13, and he’s the only one in that gridsquare that I’ve got on my list. I’ll send him an email.

Addendum²: Second pass was no better. Got flustered again, and really only tried when the bird was already past me. I recorded the pass using a little voice recorder, here is the mp3 and the much bigger wav file. The dead air in the middle is when I first tried to key down, but of course I was actually set in the DOWNLINK frequency, so it was worse than useless. The second time toward the end it’s far from clear anyone is hearing me, but the sound you hear is me coming back from the satellite. Oh well. I’ll have to rig a tripod up to make this a little more reasonable.

Addendum³: The hams that are in the recording are KG6WHO (DM04) and the aforementioned KI6IUJ. I’m recording these because I suspect I’ll hear these hams again and again, and if I have some idea who is calling, I should be able to dive in with less mental effort.

Addendum⁴: The recording above was done with a little $25 voice recorder that I had lying around. It’s actually not bad, considering. It will record about 45 minutes, and runs on a pair of AAA batteries. To record, I put a mono 2.5mm to 3.5mm headphone adapter into the speaker outlet, then used a headphone splitter, sending half to a pair of ear buds, and the other half to this recorder. I then played this back into my laptop, edited it with Audacity, cutting out the large amount of static crap at the beginning, and then saved it out as a new .wav file, and compressed that to an mp3 using “lame”.