brainwagon

Yep, another AO-51 pass this morning. I frankly was in a rush, and for the life of me can’t remember who it was I worked (although I got my first contact in Nebraska), but luckily, I recorded the QSO as always. When I get a coffee break, I’ll work my way through it. Until then, enjoy the recording.

Oh, and my progress on writing satellite tracking software seems to continue. I remembered that long ago I wrote a program for drawing the globe, so I decided to write a short script that would plot the groundtrack of the satellite. If you click on the icon to the left, you can see the north to south pass of AO-51 as it passed over my locale.

AO-51, Jan 16, 2008 16:25Z

Addendum: Got Gene WD0EQP DN91, North Platte Nebraska, AA4Q working mobile into a vertical from DM43, Tempe, AZ. Heard W0DXZ, but he didn’t come back. Too bad, he was in grid EN41, which would have been a pretty reasonable qso. Also got K6CA DM12 in San Diego who was also operating hand held with an Arrow. Oh, and Larry WA6DIR, a satellite regular.

Addendum²: I computed the footprint circle diameter and plotted that at AOS, max elevation and LOS for the satellite. As you can see, toward the end of the pass, Hawaii would have been workable. I can’t get the satellite all the way to the north because of the significant hill behind my house, otherwise I would have been able to work most of Canada, and all of Alaska.

This also points out something that I could do with my new scripts: figure out when a particular satellite is visible from to two different gridsquares. That way, you could figure out routinely whether Hawaii would be possible (for instance). I’ll try to code something like that soon.