Drew, KO4MA, didn’t let a little thing like the missing antenna on ARISSAT-1 keep him down. He aimed his antennas at the satellite, and recorded the following:

What’s goin on here? Drew has a pretty good antenna setup, which includes an M2 CP42 for the uplink. That provides about 16.8db of gain. Since the ARISSAT-1 receiver was supposed to be reasonably sensitive to be workable with portable equipment, that gain is enough to put a reasonable signal into the transponder. I don’t think I am going to be working the bird with my setup, but i suspect that there are quite a few amateurs with similar setups that could still work ARISSAT-1 even with its lack of antenna.

Very cool.

Addendum: I was rereading my posts from yesterday, when the frustration of deploying ARISSAT-1 with a missing antenna was fresh in my mind. And I do frankly admit to a fair amount of frustration with AMSAT. But I was reading some even more negative traffic on the amsat-bb list, and that put it in a bit of perspective for me. ARISSAT-1 wasn’t a waste, nor is it useless, nor was it a bad thing for AMSAT to invest in. In terms of its primary, largely educational mission, I suspect it will be quite successful. Several times during the NASA briefing yesterday, they mentioned that this was the first of a series of educational birds to be launched from the ISS. These launch opportunities are incredibly valuable to the amateur community, and we should make sure that our frustration with problems doesn’t boil over into lashing out at our allies who are helping us achieve our goals in amateur radio and space.