Well, it was a scheduled 88 degree high pass for me today on AO-51, so I was out there with my Arrow again. For the second time in a week, I’ve ended up calling CQ on the satellite because nobody was talking. That finally scared of regular WA8SME (thanks Mark) and I got Gerry, KB7F again, although I appeared to lose him before I got confirmation. Oh well. Toward the tail of the pass, my contact with WA6JE was kind of spoiled by all sorts of odd noise in Spanish. My guess is that they are some business, illegally operating on the 2m band on the uplink frequency.
Spanish Speakers on the Satellite, probably inadvertently…Check it out.
Addendum: I designed my first QSL card using the Apple Pages word processor. Here’s the one I sent Gerry via email:
I haven’t figured out how I’m going to get real cards printed yet (probably economically to have them professionally printed), so for now, I’ll be sending them out via email.
Addendum2: Wow, that looked incredibly ugly. I redid the conversion to make it look a little better.
I heard the phone ringing on AO-51 last night. Also last night and tonight I’ve heard someone I can only describe as “intermod guy”. Sounds like someone is pushing 50+ watts straight into the satellite. Voice is completely distorted, talks over everyone else, can’t ever make out a callsign or any intelligible English.
Bottom line: you don’t need more than 5 watts to transmit to AO-51. Many people do it with 1.5…
IAM STAR TING SATELLITE DXING i need some tips satellite dxing thank you my call sign kd5nzq