[amsat-bb] FD

[ka7hbb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

  Hi everyone, 
      I think my FD was about like everyone else's. Murphy lives!
I hadn't been active on the satellites  for quite awhile.  (need to 
buy more coax) but I decided to show up and try to show some of the
other ops in the area how sat's work.  I just put a short tripod on a 
4x8 trailer and topped it off with az/el rotor and a cushcraft 145 
20t and and klm 430 16. Got there and just oriented the trailer so 
the azmath rotor and the compass agreed. Pointed the thing at AO-10 
and could just barely hear myself about 10 db down from everyone 
else. (yeasu 736 barefoot) Got the old chicken shack swr meter out 
and whoops 2.5 swr. By the time I got that figured out and the 
polarity box opened up and dried out AO-10 was below the ridge. 
    I got looking at IT and found the next pass was FO20 and with 
luck I might make 1 or 2 contacts before it would loose it below the 
tree line. (no 432 preamp and I've only tried FO20 once before)
   To make a long story short we made 1 FO20 contact and I did feel 
better.    But just for practice and since I was going home to get 
some sleep soon I showed a couple of younger hams how to run the 
gear. 1 had worked UO-14 with his hand held and was all fired up to 
atleast try. 
   Next sat to come over was a good pass for SO-35 and we put the 
aprs station on to listen and was listening with the analog station 
when low and behold voices popped up.  Everyone just standing around 
was drawen over to the sat station for a listen. We backed away from 
the radio a bit and left it on the speaker figuring the odds of feed 
back from the sat was slim and everyone wanted to hear. We made 3 
good contacts and everyone thought it was the biggest rush of FD.
   Thanks for the contacts with W7O and now I need to get things set
back up at the house. 73, Mike

Mike Nason
 
ka7hbb@navicom.com
ka7hbb@amsat.org
mike_nason@hp.com
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