Satgen56    Packet Radio Satellites - Toys or useful tools ?

Have had some interesting packet mail lately. Mostly from those who would
like to see the Pacsats used, rather than abused. The problems are of
course coming up on FO-20 because it was first, but they are also begining
to appear on the other Pacsats. Typical examples are :-
A. JOY RIDERS , the idiots who hold their key down producing pages of
repeats of their callsign.  B. HIGH RUBBISH CONTENT , visible by capturing
a FO-20 pass on disc then editing it on a word processor to remove the
junk. An exercise which can turn 50kb of original into 2kb of useful
traffic. C. READING OTHER PEOPLES MAIL , lots of stations take up an
exhorbitant amount of system time by reading mail not addressed to them.

One gent has called me undemocratic, because I object to these practices.
I suggest that once individuals have proved they can access and download
traffic, they should restrict themselves to constructive usage of these
marvelous new satellites. If we allow any or all of the pacsats to become 
"Towers of Babel", we only have ourselves to blame

Pacsat and Lusat have shifted over to binary telemetry. Software for
binary capture and decoding is coming shortly. Uosat3 has introduced a new
status symbol, with its MHEARD report listing stations successfully
accessing this hi tech bird. The display only shows the latest 18 or so
calls heard, but over the past week it has run through some very
interesting calls , amongst which I was glad to see 5 UK stations. So if
you wish to be numbered amongst the first hundred on Uosat3 , you had
better hurry up. UoS (G0K8KA) would also like details of your ground
station by post, packet or telemail ,please.

Living as I do in the middle of a small Scottish village where many of the
adjacent cottages were built just after Bonnie Prince Charlie left for
France in 1746, BIG TOWERS AND MASTS ARE OUT. So I have got by so far with
2 antennas on the bungalow chimney (21 ele H 70cm and 5XY 2m) azimuth
rotation only, plus a 3m minitower in the back yard with Az and El
rotators for a 48 ele MBM 70cm and a 5H yagi 2m. With adjacent houses very
close this leaves two big gaps in coverage. So have begun experimenting to
fill these gaps with temporary helixes and small yagis. I find circular
polarisation of very little if any advantage. One simple 5 ele 70cm yagi
plus gasfet,is best choice so far for one of my two gaps. Further test
will be reported. 73 de GM4IHJ@GB7MAC   24th April 90