I suspect the world would be better if that percentage were even greater.
Evening satellite passes…
Sigh. Just went out to try to work AO-51, couldn’t hear anything from the satellite, nor could I raise it. It was only after I got back inside that I remembered that the powers that be had scheduled some days where the 1.2ghz uplink was active. Sadly, that means that while passing by California, not a single ham with the necessary equipment chose to work the uplink.
SO-50 pass coming up shortly.
Addendum: Got W5YM, AD7ZQ and XE2BL.
Addendum2: Spent some more time playing around with cocoaModem. Looking for PSK31 signals, I actually had the best luck on 80m, which was suprisingly un-noisy and had quite a few signals, even though I just had a 20m dipole up. Here’s a screengrab:
Comment from Patrick Stoddard
Time 2/14/2008 at 10:29 am
Hi Mark!
XE2BL… maybe Manuel, XE2BHL in DM12 (Tijuana)?? I haven’t had a chance to hear the MP3, but I know I haven’t heard an XE2BL on the satellites in 2+ years.
As for AO-51 with the L-band uplink during the week this month, I’m not happy with that for selfish reasons… no reason to drive to nearby grids in the evenings. Until April, AO-51 will be in sunlight basically all the time, and it’s necessary to keep the batteries from being overcharged and keep the satellite’s internal temperature under control. That’s why there have been dual downlinks on 435.300 and 2401.200 MHz, and the uplinks changing from 145.920 to 1268.700 MHz.
The receiver used for L-band is very similar to the old Icom IC-R10 wide-band handheld receiver. The IC-R10 draws more power than the 145.920 MHz uplink receiver, and using that along with the two downlinks helps keep the satellite functioning until it returns to orbits with some amount of darkness to control the battery charging and onboard temperature.
Maybe with the SO-50 passes moving earlier in the evening, I will get back to that in a few days or in the next week. Need some more grids for your satellite log? 🙂
73!
Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK