Satgen 531 Level Playing Field 1 by GM4IHJ (BID SGEN531) 1999-05-29 Forget about the weather and local amenities. Where would you like to live in order to satisfy your ambition to be the greatest ever amsat operator ? No location is perfect, but some locations are nearer perfection than others. What matters is Latitude and Longitude. Latitude is important in many different ways. An amsat launching to a low inclination low altitude orbit from say Florida, will never appear above the horizon of a station above latitude 50N or 50S. Which does not affect many folks in the southern hemisphere, because few people live that far south . Noting that southern winters are much fiercer than northern ones (consequent on the eccentricity of the earths orbit around the Sun), and there is not much suitable land for folks to live on in the far south anyway. But if you reside above 50N, you can live in reasonable comfort much nearer the pole, and lots of Europeans do just that. Warmed by the less severe northern winters and still further comforted by the warmth of the Gulf stream. However they cannot access low earth orbit amsats which use low inclination orbits. Which means roughly half of all Shuttle SAREX missions and amsats such as Sedsat will not be heard at northern stations. Fortunately for the future , the International Space station will orbit at an inclination just above 50 degs, so much of Northern Europe will be able to access it. A situation which would not have applied if the original American plan for a station at inclination 28 degs , had gone ahead. So future space traffic should be audible to most of the worlds radio amateurs , permitting the very useful " QSOs to Schools " program to be heard by almost all would be users. However this is not the end of the Latitude story. Before you begin to feel sympathy for Northern stations, please note that they seem to get far more satellite time on task than equatorial stations. The reason for this becomes obvious if you consider the way successive orbits of satellites with high orbital inclination ( eg 82 to 98 degs), appear to crowd together as they approach the poles. Such that a station in Scotland at 56N can access part of nearly every orbit of a radiosport LEOsat (inc 82 degs). Whereas stations on the equator see perhaps 3 successive orbit followed by a break of 8 hours or so before they see another 3 successive orbits , ie 6 orbits total versus 10 or 12 per day for a station above 50 degs latitude. Even more advantageous to near polar stations is the fact that the footprint ( part of the earth the satellite can see at any one time ) of a high inclination amsat , allows stations at high latitude to access the satellite when it is far to the east or the west. Which for a Scottish station means west to Alaska or east to Siberia ie nearly all the way around the northern hemisphere. Whereas stations nearer the equator are generally restricted to contacts with stations on their own continent. However it is not all roses for high latitude stations. As will be reported in the next satgen.