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Bouncing a signal through the NO-44 satellite

January 15th, 2015 | Author:

One of my favourite tweeters on radio matters is Patrick WD9EWK Patrick is a keen member of AMSAT and the wider amateur satellite community. Just recently, Patrick has been experimenting sending APRS packets through the old NO-44 satellite.

NO-44 or PCSAT is one of those satellites that is in its’, er, twilight years. The battery failed some time ago and now the satellite operates when the solar panels can supply it enough power to make it go. It was and is, an APRS digipeater in space. Recently, Patrick has shown making keyboard to keyboard APRS QSOs through NO-44 as well as simply digipeating his own signals. Patrick had used his Kenwood APRS enabled handheld and his handheld Arrow antenna.

I thought I should try! I noticed a pass this morning where NO-44 was in sun all the way up over the South Atlantic before passing directly overhead us here in the UK, so got the ‘usual’ ISS packet setup going, using the V-2000 vertical and wondered if I would hear anything.

All was quiet until I calculated the satellite was almost directly overhead and I send a packet, with the unproto path set to PCSAT via W3ADO-1 To my surprise, I heard a weak packet. Too weak for me to decode, but as I discovered later, thanks to Paul N8HM, the ON7EQ-1 gateway heard it and retransmitted it and plotted me on the map you’ll see below

You can see the map and the stations heard through PCSAT at http://pcsat.aprs.org 
I think the next trick will be to try and receive it for myself, which may require the use of the Elk yagi.

What I’ve been playing with over Christmas and New Year (anyone want a nice FT1000MP?)

January 3rd, 2015 | Author:

With my return to work on the horizon on Monday, I’ve been thinking about what a nice holiday I’ve had. Although I’ve had to do a bit of work here and there, it’s not been too onerous which has been welcome.

I’ve not done anything exceptionally different this holiday, but it’s been nice varied activity. There have been a couple of sessions when I bounced my 144MHz packet signals through the digipeater on the International Space Station. That’s always satisfying and nice to do – particularly with a very simple aerial.

I missed the ISS’ SSTV operations but all of that made me think about operating SSTV a little and it’s been fun to play with and I’ve had 2 or 3 nice ‘QSOs’ or picture exchanges with many other pictures being seen.

Fun to play with for something different!
It has been nice having the TS940 on the bench to tune around with. I find it is a lovely rig to tune the bands with. I wondered whether I would feel the same if I put the FT1000MP on the bench and tried using that in the same way. It just didn’t feel quite as nice, despite the two receivers and the internal ATU and being a generally lovely rig. So I have made the decision to let the FT1000MP move on. It is in nice condition and works well and I am sure someone will have fun with it (if you’re interested – drop me a mail tim at g4vxe dot com). So despite the TS940s foibles, I think it will stay here and we’ll try and keep it going.
On HF, I’ve not made any exceptional contacts, but it’s been fun to work the 1A0C expedition on a few bands. I’d worked 1A0 on 50MHz before but strangely not on HF. Otherwise, it’s just been looking across the higher bands as they’ve been open.
I’ve upgraded the station logging program, uLog from M0PZT who has a new release out.
I noticed a new product from SOTABeams, the BOXA-MWEXTREME which is a fun little box (an attenuator really) which, in conjunction with your low power HF rig, allows you to run very small amounts of power indeed, allowing an HF rig running between 1 to 5W to drop the power down as low as 50mW. It’s RF switched, so the receive path is not attenuated in the same way (though on HF you probably could on some of the bands!). I thought that would be fun to try, so I’ve pre-ordered. Not sure whether my long cable run to the HF6V will be conductive to that, but we will have a go.
Happy New Year for 2015!

What I’ve been playing with over Christmas and New Year (anyone want a nice FT1000MP?)

January 3rd, 2015 | Author:

With my return to work on the horizon on Monday, I’ve been thinking about what a nice holiday I’ve had. Although I’ve had to do a bit of work here and there, it’s not been too onerous which has been welcome.

I’ve not done anything exceptionally different this holiday, but it’s been nice varied activity. There have been a couple of sessions when I bounced my 144MHz packet signals through the digipeater on the International Space Station. That’s always satisfying and nice to do – particularly with a very simple aerial.

I missed the ISS’ SSTV operations but all of that made me think about operating SSTV a little and it’s been fun to play with and I’ve had 2 or 3 nice ‘QSOs’ or picture exchanges with many other pictures being seen.

Fun to play with for something different!
It has been nice having the TS940 on the bench to tune around with. I find it is a lovely rig to tune the bands with. I wondered whether I would feel the same if I put the FT1000MP on the bench and tried using that in the same way. It just didn’t feel quite as nice, despite the two receivers and the internal ATU and being a generally lovely rig. So I have made the decision to let the FT1000MP move on. It is in nice condition and works well and I am sure someone will have fun with it (if you’re interested – drop me a mail tim at g4vxe dot com). So despite the TS940s foibles, I think it will stay here and we’ll try and keep it going.
On HF, I’ve not made any exceptional contacts, but it’s been fun to work the 1A0C expedition on a few bands. I’d worked 1A0 on 50MHz before but strangely not on HF. Otherwise, it’s just been looking across the higher bands as they’ve been open.
I’ve upgraded the station logging program, uLog from M0PZT who has a new release out.
I noticed a new product from SOTABeams, the BOXA-MWEXTREME which is a fun little box (an attenuator really) which, in conjunction with your low power HF rig, allows you to run very small amounts of power indeed, allowing an HF rig running between 1 to 5W to drop the power down as low as 50mW. It’s RF switched, so the receive path is not attenuated in the same way (though on HF you probably could on some of the bands!). I thought that would be fun to try, so I’ve pre-ordered. Not sure whether my long cable run to the HF6V will be conductive to that, but we will have a go.
Happy New Year for 2015!

A taste of remote operation with Justin G4TSH

December 29th, 2014 | Author:

It was great to have Justin G4TSH join us for Christmas again this year. In between the the obligatory and very enjoyable Christmassy activities, it was fun to look at Justin’s remote operating capability.
He brought with him what is essentially a remote front panel for the Elecraft K3, a Microset box and a laptop. The Microset box and the laptop were connected to our WiFi. Once this had been established, we were able to use the remote station in the south-west of the UK.
On the laptop we could control the rotator, but pretty much everything else could be controlled from the front panel of the K3.
It worked really well! Most of the time we were looking around on 10m and we both worked some nice South American stations (including CX1JJ and HC2IMP) using the big C31 yagi. There was no perceptible lag owing to network latency and to all intents and purposes.
Magical! It was really good to try this and to be able to use a nice big yagi on HF again. Thanks Justin!

A taste of remote operation with Justin G4TSH

December 29th, 2014 | Author:

It was great to have Justin G4TSH join us for Christmas again this year. In between the the obligatory and very enjoyable Christmassy activities, it was fun to look at Justin’s remote operating capability.
He brought with him what is essentially a remote front panel for the Elecraft K3, a Microset box and a laptop. The Microset box and the laptop were connected to our WiFi. Once this had been established, we were able to use the remote station in the south-west of the UK.
On the laptop we could control the rotator, but pretty much everything else could be controlled from the front panel of the K3.
It worked really well! Most of the time we were looking around on 10m and we both worked some nice South American stations (including CX1JJ and HC2IMP) using the big C31 yagi. There was no perceptible lag owing to network latency and to all intents and purposes.
Magical! It was really good to try this and to be able to use a nice big yagi on HF again. Thanks Justin!

Merry Christmas: SSTV, ISS Packet, SatPC32 and other stuff

December 24th, 2014 | Author:

No posts for the last little while! Like most people, I guess, the run up to Christmas has been busy. But since finishing work on Friday, in between visiting and other Christmassy things, I have been playing radio in the downtime.

One day last week, I had a nice QSO on the way to the station with Paul G0HWC. We talked about digital SSTV and in particular, Easypal. I told Paul that I had never managed to get it going on my PC and he kindly gave me some ideas (wipe it out completely, clean the registry and then reinstall). Did that and unfortunately it still crashes on load and there are no clues. What a shame! It probably doesn’t like something on this old laptop.

Thinking about SSTV did encourage me to get MMSSTV (analog SSTV) going again and I put it on 28.680 one afternoon and received some nice pictures from TA1BM in particular and VA2PGQ and some others. I then wondered if I could get it going on 145MHz through the FT-8900. I rigged up the interface and fired up MMSSTV and actually it worked well! I haven’t made any QSOs on there so far, but I did use my phone and a Baofeng handheld to check the signal and it seemed to be working fine.

Having got the interface hooked up to the FT8900 reminded me that last Christmas I had a lot of fun bouncing packet signals through the digipeater on the ISS and I hadn’t tried it for a while. With an ISS pass imminent, I loaded up the UZ7HO soundmodem software, made sure it was decoding packets and transmitting them and then the UISS software. After a few moments, I started to hear some weak packets from the digipeater on the Space Station , so as they got stronger (just using the vertical antenna) I hit transmit and was pleased to see the spacestation repeat my packet.
Talking of satellites, I’ve made the odd late evening QSO through AO-73 over the last month on CW. I’d been keen to look at the SatPC32 software What it does which I didn’t have before was the capability to work out doppler shifts for up and downlink frequencies. When you have a weak signals on the satellite it is good to have an idea of where to listen. It just took a few moments to work out how to make it do what I wanted. AO-7 was due over, coincidentally, as I finished working it out, so I dropped my 432MHz signal where it said, listened on 145MHz where it said and there I was. Weak but unmistakably me. So that’s exciting and perhaps another satellite to try when it’s close to the horizon. I also tried the software out on a pass of FO-29 and was pleased to work DL0SX.
There’s been a few CW QSOs on HF too, using the TS-940 which seems to have settled down nicely. A61Q was a nice one on 24MHz CW just now. I even found myself calling V5/DL3DXX in a pileup – and then stopped myself!
Merry Christmas to you and your families. Thank you for reading the blog!

Merry Christmas: SSTV, ISS Packet, SatPC32 and other stuff

December 24th, 2014 | Author:

No posts for the last little while! Like most people, I guess, the run up to Christmas has been busy. But since finishing work on Friday, in between visiting and other Christmassy things, I have been playing radio in the downtime.

One day last week, I had a nice QSO on the way to the station with Paul G0HWC. We talked about digital SSTV and in particular, Easypal. I told Paul that I had never managed to get it going on my PC and he kindly gave me some ideas (wipe it out completely, clean the registry and then reinstall). Did that and unfortunately it still crashes on load and there are no clues. What a shame! It probably doesn’t like something on this old laptop.

Thinking about SSTV did encourage me to get MMSSTV (analog SSTV) going again and I put it on 28.680 one afternoon and received some nice pictures from TA1BM in particular and VA2PGQ and some others. I then wondered if I could get it going on 145MHz through the FT-8900. I rigged up the interface and fired up MMSSTV and actually it worked well! I haven’t made any QSOs on there so far, but I did use my phone and a Baofeng handheld to check the signal and it seemed to be working fine.

Having got the interface hooked up to the FT8900 reminded me that last Christmas I had a lot of fun bouncing packet signals through the digipeater on the ISS and I hadn’t tried it for a while. With an ISS pass imminent, I loaded up the UZ7HO soundmodem software, made sure it was decoding packets and transmitting them and then the UISS software. After a few moments, I started to hear some weak packets from the digipeater on the Space Station , so as they got stronger (just using the vertical antenna) I hit transmit and was pleased to see the spacestation repeat my packet.
Talking of satellites, I’ve made the odd late evening QSO through AO-73 over the last month on CW. I’d been keen to look at the SatPC32 software What it does which I didn’t have before was the capability to work out doppler shifts for up and downlink frequencies. When you have a weak signals on the satellite it is good to have an idea of where to listen. It just took a few moments to work out how to make it do what I wanted. AO-7 was due over, coincidentally, as I finished working it out, so I dropped my 432MHz signal where it said, listened on 145MHz where it said and there I was. Weak but unmistakably me. So that’s exciting and perhaps another satellite to try when it’s close to the horizon. I also tried the software out on a pass of FO-29 and was pleased to work DL0SX.
There’s been a few CW QSOs on HF too, using the TS-940 which seems to have settled down nicely. A61Q was a nice one on 24MHz CW just now. I even found myself calling V5/DL3DXX in a pileup – and then stopped myself!
Merry Christmas to you and your families. Thank you for reading the blog!

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