brainwagon

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…