Satgen48   Satellite Bulletin Board, Digipeaters and S Band

For over a week now JAS1-B callsign 8J1JBS has been providing store
and forward message facilities. Its JD downlink is easily read by any
suitably equiped station, but on many passes over Europe it is being
overwhelmed by the large number of would be Users. The number of stations
accessing is more than expected at this stage , and is a nice surprise.

Meanwhile Lusat and Pacsat are begining to offer digipeater facilities 
whilst they continue to upload their main bbs software. Lusat in
particular has an excellent signal into Northern Europe and will be where
I plan to do my first experiments, noting that I get 5 minutes of solid
copy on the near polar quiet orbits, when Pacsat rarely gives any useful
signal.

For the forthcoming S Band 2401.143 MHz transmissions from Pacsat, the
equipment here is a 2m dish with a homebrew wave guide horn feeding a
2400/144 MHz convertor  and an R7000 Rx. With the present winter weather (
two 100km snow storms in the last 3 days ), the dish is indoors looking
south through a very large single pane window , and trainable 135 to 225.
It was set up on Sun noise using the standard technique of ensuring 
agreement of mechanical and electrical pointing , by lining up to get both
the wave guide horn shadow central on the dish, and, get max Sun noise at
the same time. As yet have not heard Pacsat S Band. Every orbit I have
tried has been dead despite one short bulletin saying it was on. As the
telemetry has shown hex D0 or closely related values since launch, that 
figure is not a useful guide, as it has been that way even when Amsat NA
were apologising for it being off. So will continue listening now and
again and doing the odd confidence check on AO13 S Band.
73 de GM4IHJ@GB7MAC 27th Feb 90