brainwagon

I don’t really have the hardware to effectively transmit to satellites in linear transponder mode. To really make it straightforward, you probably would like to have a computer to handle the Doppler tracking and antenna pointing, and a full duplex SSB transmitter (or a pair of ordinary ones). That’s more than I am willing to invest at the moment, but with my little FT-817, you can actually receive these birds pretty easily, using my ever present Arrow antenna and just tuning by hand. So, that’s what I did this morning: here is my recording of HO-68. It begins with a bit of the CW beacon, then shows me tuning around to try to find SSB signals. Sometimes, the tracking is pretty good, but later in the recording, my next door neighbor began mowing his lawn and running a leaf blower, and it was hard to hear (I need to use my over the ear headphones instead of these earbuds I’ve used for FM passes). Anyway, here’s the recording:

2009-12-30-HO68-SSB, recording by K6HX in CM87 using an FT-817 and hand tuning