Re: [amsat-bb] catch the HEO fever, donate.

["Werner H. Berli" <w.h.berli@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Greg Wycoff wrote:
> ...
> I hope others will share their thought and memory's of AO-40/AO-13/AO-10 
> so we can help start the drive for raising money for EAGLE and get 
> others geared up for P3E.
> ...

I became QRV on the AO-40 late in its life, on Aug. 20th 2003.
I started out in mode U/S with antennas made out of cardboard boxes and 
aluminum foil, the way Tony, AA2TX described them on p. 57 of QST March 
2003, and with a DB6NT S-to-2m downconverter. The rig was an IC-910. I 
was able to operate very close out to the apogee, with the 50W UHF into 
the corner uplink antenna. The performance of the downlink S-band horn 
surprised me.

I operated mostly from indoors, through an open window and thus could 
not make use of every pass, but after my first 5 passes I had reached 
all 6 continents with the cardboard antennas and I own a WAC-SAT for that.

After a while I got a 85cm offset dish with a dualpatch feed for mode 
L/S, with 10W out from the IC-910.

Until the unfortunate early death of the AO-40 in Jan. 2004 I was able 
to only take advantage of a total of 26 passes, made a total of 110 
QSOs, both CW and SSB and reached 39 DXCC entities.

I have made a sizable donation toward P3E and hope you all will too.

73

Werner, HB9US, AMSAT-DL # 302508,
but since I have no AMSAT-NA #, noone over there will be interested in 
my comments anyway...
----
Sent via amsat-bb@amsat.org. Opinions expressed are those of the author.
Not an AMSAT member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program!
To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe amsat-bb" to Majordomo@amsat.org