Re: [amsat-bb] VO-52 portable finally /w Mississippi

[Jason Hitesman <jradio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

ka8syx2003@aol.com wrote:

> You're absolutely right; all that work keeping radios tuned and antenna pointed keeps you busy.  Get yourself a little digital voice recorder and use a Y-adapter to both listen via headphones and record off the same audio out from your downlink receiver.  Although in the heat of battle I still sometimes get calls mixed up, at least there's a record of the QSO to support the confirmation.  I picked up a Sony recorder with about a 6hr capacity for $30 on eBay and "won't leave home without it."  It even has a date/time stamp for getting the QSO time right.

That's what I'm doing on the FM sats.  With an antenna in one hand and a 
mic in the other I don't have any left to write down calls.  And I've 
got zero chance of remembering all the calls I heard on a pass :D

So I ran up to the local Best Buy and picked up an Olympus digital 
recorder.  Pretty handy, smaller than my cell phone and does good 
quality, plus I can just plug it into my USB port on my computer and 
download the files for storage and review.

Only problem is the first few times I tried it I got WAY too much noise. 
  What I heard in my headphones and what the recorder picked up off the 
same Y cable sounded completely different.  Figured I was overdriving 
the recorder so I grabbed the volume cable between my computer and 
speaker system for the next pass - that solved the problem.  Now I get 
about the same audio on the recorder that I hear in my headphones.

Here's how AO-51 sounded at 5:50 6.12.2005 UTC from Yuma AZ with a 
freebie antenna I whipped up following K5OE's Handi-tenna webpage.  (the 
first 2 minutes are me waiting for the sat - this is an unedited clip 
around 1:34 you hear the FM quieting kick in and then right at 2 minutes 
it starts coming in...the occasional beeps are me tuning the TM-733 I'm 
using)

http://www.yumaduners.com/jth_upload/DW_A0011.mp3

Now I need to whip up a permanant cable for this so I don't have to keep 
stealing the speaker cable from my computer :D

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Jason
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