brainwagon

I was going to present a link the cool OSCAR Satellite Status page by KD5QGR because it can be useful for beginners to see which satellites other amateurs are hearing. If you’ll notice, for a long time only telemetry was being heard on AO-51 (the easiest of the LEO satellites), but in the last few […]

I was chatting with my brother about my recent attempts at satellite tracking, and he expressed the opinion that it would be nice to present some of the details about how I actually figure out where satellites are. I’m not sure that my methodology is particularly noteworthy, but here’s what I use: There are lots […]

Well, I’m trying, but I’m finding that I need a third hand to work satellite handheld. Maybe some kind of tripod ala K7AGE would free up my hands enough to be able to be a little more calm. I managed to get my call out, but I failed to copy the responder’s call properly, so […]

Modern ham transceivers are complex. Really complex. They have dozens and dozens of settings, hundreds of memories, and they are kind of a pain to program. That’s why most radio manufacturers now include an ability to “clone” a radio from another one, and perhaps even a way to actually use software to design a configuration […]

Hey, a milestone for me. During my morning commute, I managed to actually send a position report to the amateur radio satellite GO-32, which got picked up by W7KKE in Lincoln City, Oregon, a distance of 810 miles, not bad! I wasn’t sure it had worked, but I noticed that I had received some packets […]

Well, I haven’t had a lot of time to do anything good this weekend. I spent some time mowing my lawn, pulling weeds, fertilizing, and examining my fence for needed repairs. But I did spend some time to actually figure out what my problem was with receiving signals from the AO-27 amateur satellite. It wasn’t […]

I noticed that a 56 degree elevation pass of the amateur satellite AO-51 was going to occur just after 9:00am this morning, while I was commuting. I normally carry my little VX-3R with tiny mag-mounted dual band antenna on the roof. This is the same gadget that I used to receive the AO-51 broadcast of […]

Last week I got my FCC-1 kit from the Norcal QRP club. It’s a nifty little PIC based frequency counter, and is quite inexpensive. It’s not very hard to assemble, but I still managed to have a couple of minor problems. Hint to anyone assembling the kit: REMEMBER! The switches are soldered on the wrong […]

Well, this is a bit late, but earlier today I read that the amateur satellite AO-51 was going to be a “special event” station. In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik I, they were going to rebroadcast the original signal from Sputnik. ARRLWeb: ARRL Home Page What’s slightly awesome is that […]

While tinkering with my little TenTec receiver, I’ve been hearing a ton of radio teletype signals. Apparently it’s the CQWW RTTY contest this weekend, which my ham friends who are more into all this say is the biggest contest of the year. I’m more interested in actual conversation, so I was kind of bored, but […]