February 2015 - AMSAT-BB - mailman.amsat.org

Re: [amsat-bb] Inexpensive tablet for SDR + CAT control to portable rig
by GW1FKY＠aol.com 24 Feb '15

24 Feb '15

Hi Clayton,Patrick, Something that I have also been thinking about for my portable set up - I do have an "Android" tablet but was thinking along the lines of a "Windows" system so that I could also use the "Funcube" dongle. Sadly those tablets that you mention ( WINBOOK for example) are not available over here in the UK. At such a give away price that you are able to purchase them now in the USA, you can't go wrong especially with USB2, micro USB and HDMI ports. -Blue Tooth. "WOW" Good Luck. Ken Eaton GW1FKY Ps. Perhaps even use one as stand alone system like the "Tracker Board " that used to exist - and just upload "keps" direct via Wi -fi ,Blue Tooth or a USB memory stick.

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Yuma Hamfest wrapup
by Patrick STODDARD (WD9EWK/VA7EWK) 24 Feb '15

24 Feb '15

Hi! Now that I've been home a day, and back to work today, I can sit down and write a little more about the two-day Yuma Hamfest that I attended with an AMSAT booth. This hamfest has become (I think) the largest in Arizona, and I heard that over 1000 hams attended. It draws hams from all over Arizona, California, Nevada, and the "snowbirds" from other parts of the US and Canada. And a few hams came up from northern Mexico to join in the fun. There was steady traffic past the AMSAT booth on both days. I had Rick K7TEJ helping me for much of the weekend, and his help was appreciated very much. He left his homebrew dual-band Yagi (2 elements on 2m, 5 on 70cm) on a telescope mount and tripod at the AMSAT booth during the two days, along with my Elk 2m/70cm log periodic. Between the two of us, we had demonstrations on two AO-73 passes, two SO-50 passes, and one pass each on 3 other satellites (AO-7, FO-29, NO-44), with a total of 34 QSOs. Lots of flyers and the Getting Started with Amateur Satellites books were flying off the table, and we had good crowds for the demonstrations outside the main building on the Yuma County Fairgrounds. I posted pictures from the hamfest over the two days on my @WD9EWK Twitter feed. You are welcome to look through my feed and see those photos and other comments at: http://twitter.com/WD9EWK if you are not a Twitter user. The SO-50 passes, as expected, were the busiest of the passes worked from Yuma. Much of the time, those passes were great illustrations of what can be heard on an FM satellite. Even some of the not-so-good operating examples made for excellent teaching moments. I don't have any videos of the demonstrations this year, but have some videos of the aircraft flying into or out of Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, the airfield across the street from the hamfest site (the runways at that airfield are shared with Yuma International Airport, with both civilian and military aircraft coming and going throughout the day). Those videos, and others I have uploaded over the years, can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/va7ewk Thanks to everyone who worked WD9EWK during the hamfest. And a special thank-you for those who were standing by to work me, as I tried to complete QSOs with other stations that may have been closer to their LOS times than you. I have uploaded those QSOs to Logbook of the World. Please e-mail me directly (with QSO details) if you'd like to receive a WD9EWK QSL card to confirm those QSOs. You don't have to send me a card or SASE first. The hamfest was in grid DM22. 73! Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK http://www.wd9ewk.net/

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Re: [amsat-bb] Yuma Hamfest wrapup
by Patrick STODDARD (WD9EWK/VA7EWK) 24 Feb '15

24 Feb '15

Hector, Thanks for the compliments. I can't take full credit for how well the AMSAT presence was in Yuma, with Rick K7TEJ spending a lot of the weekend helping at the booth and his demonstration of NO-44 on Saturday morning. With over 1000 attendees from all over, the AMSAT message was definitely being received out there. This is the sort of thing I enjoy doing, as part of my support for AMSAT. I'm not a "rocket scientist", so I don't help in building the satellites. I've attended an average of around 10 events a year representing AMSAT since becoming an Area Coordinator in late 2006. There are a bunch of us who are in the field representing AMSAT at all sorts of events, and (putting my Director of Field Operations cap on now) I can always use more. :-) 73! Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK http://www.wd9ewk.net/ On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 4:15 AM, Hector W5CBF/CO6CBF <kf5yxv(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Good job Patrick! I do know that it is a huge help to AMSAT and all the > satellite community. There are a lot of ham interested in the satellite > operation and some of them for any reason never have started. They just need > one more motivation and you are giving it to them.

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Inexpensive tablet for SDR + CAT control to portable rig
by Clayton Coleman 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

Inspired by some Twitter traffic from WD9EWK & others discussing the success of inexpensive Windows 8.1 tablets used for SDR, I decided to purchase one last week. Now that these tablets are running full Windows and not the RT version, I felt it was time to do a little experimentation. I opted for an 8" tablet with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB internal storage at an amazing price of $79. The tablet has two USB ports and Bluetooth. HDSDR seems to be running fine on my tablet in parallel with SatPC32. At the moment I have not noticed any performance issues monitoring signals with HDSDR on the tablet paired with the FUNcube Dongle Pro+. I've installed Virtual Serial Ports so that I can allow the two applications to communicate via CAT commands. My next goal is to add a Bluetooth adapter to my Yaesu FT-817's CAT port. Through the Bluetooth adapter, the tablet will see the radio as a new serial port. I will then configure it as the second transceiver in SatPC32. This not only eliminates a cable between the radio and the tablet, it also keeps one of my USB ports available while using less battery. I've already tested SatPC32+HSDR with this combination of FT-817+FUNcube Dongle Pro+ for many months on a several "standard" PC environments with great success. The end goal will be a fully computer controlled, very portable, SDR-capable satellite station. I'm always looking for other ideas how I might improve or do things differently. Anyone else trying this configuration? 73 Clayton W5PFG

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QIKcom Satellite Modes?
by Robert Bruninga 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

APRS Satellite operators: We are delivering our next APRS satellite (QIKcom-1) next week and it will have a mission life of maybe 6 months. It is a very quick reaction short fuse opportunity so we are simply going to fly an APRS digipeater (TinyTrack4) supporting the three digipeater aliases of ARISS, APRSAT and WIDEn-N but it will operate at 4 Watts RF power and be easily heard on any HT.. It has no other CPU on board and so it flies with only the fixed settings set before launch. But we do have an A/B switch which can be used to switch between two bank settings. I just cannot think of any neat must-do ideas for how to use the other bank settings. The host spacecraft has plenty of power, so there is no need for low power options… (they can simply turn us off if needed). Telemetry is a boring Volts, current, and two internal temps. The settings in bank 0 are now: DIGIPEATER: ON ALIASES: ARISS, APRSAT, WIDEn-N BTEXT: USNA-W3ADO APRS Satellite every 2 minutes TELEMETRY: every 1 minute. I just cannot think of any use for a separate bank settings? If you have ideas of how to use the A/B settings let me know. Bob, WB4aPR

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ISS SSTV
by Steve Kristoff 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

Pictures are still coming in on most recent pass at EM 79 (southeast Indiana). Steve AI9IN

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Re: [amsat-bb] Yuma Hamfest wrapup
by Richard Tejera 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

Glad to have helped out, Patrick. I was a bit surprised at the interest my antenna and mount drew. Had several folks take pictures of it got lots of questions about the mount. It served well to show a simple satellite antenna can be built for less than $20.00. A lot of folks expressed interest. But said the lack of usable birds was keeping them from jumping in. This was the perfect opening to talk up the Upcoming Fox launches. Most perked up at that, so it's all good. 73 Rick K7TEJ On February 23, 2015, at 15:13, "Patrick STODDARD (WD9EWK/VA7EWK)" <amsat-bb(a)wd9ewk.net> wrote: Hi! Now that I've been home a day, and back to work today, I can sit down and write a little more about the two-day Yuma Hamfest that I attended with an AMSAT booth. This hamfest has become (I think) the largest in Arizona, and I heard that over 1000 hams attended. It draws hams from all over Arizona, California, Nevada, and the "snowbirds" from other parts of the US and Canada. And a few hams came up from northern Mexico to join in the fun. There was steady traffic past the AMSAT booth on both days. I had Rick K7TEJ helping me for much of the weekend, and his help was appreciated very much. He left his homebrew dual-band Yagi (2 elements on 2m, 5 on 70cm) on a telescope mount and tripod at the AMSAT booth during the two days, along with my Elk 2m/70cm log periodic. Between the two of us, we had demonstrations on two AO-73 passes, two SO-50 passes, and one pass each on 3 other satellites (AO-7, FO-29, NO-44), with a total of 34 QSOs. Lots of flyers and the Getting Started with Amateur Satellites books were flying off the table, and we had good crowds for the demonstrations outside the main building on the Yuma County Fairgrounds. I posted pictures from the hamfest over the two days on my @WD9EWK Twitter feed. You are welcome to look through my feed and see those photos and other comments at: http://twitter.com/WD9EWK if you are not a Twitter user. The SO-50 passes, as expected, were the busiest of the passes worked from Yuma. Much of the time, those passes were great illustrations of what can be heard on an FM satellite. Even some of the not-so-good operating examples made for excellent teaching moments. I don't have any videos of the demonstrations this year, but have some videos of the aircraft flying into or out of Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, the airfield across the street from the hamfest site (the runways at that airfield are shared with Yuma International Airport, with both civilian and military aircraft coming and going throughout the day). Those videos, and others I have uploaded over the years, can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/va7ewk Thanks to everyone who worked WD9EWK during the hamfest. And a special thank-you for those who were standing by to work me, as I tried to complete QSOs with other stations that may have been closer to their LOS times than you. I have uploaded those QSOs to Logbook of the World. Please e-mail me directly (with QSO details) if you'd like to receive a WD9EWK QSL card to confirm those QSOs. You don't have to send me a card or SASE first. The hamfest was in grid DM22. 73! Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK http://www.wd9ewk.net/ _______________________________________________ Sent via AMSAT-BB(a)amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the official views of AMSAT-NA. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: http://amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb

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Re: [amsat-bb] ISS packet
by Vince Fiscus, KB7ADL 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

At 05:30 PM 2/23/2015 -0500, Steve Kristoff <skristof(a)etczone.com> wrote: >OK. Is there actually any way for an old man who only sort of knows >computers to actually do packet on the ISS? >I have tried MixW, UISS, AGWPE, UZ7?? soundmodem, and they all have me >baffled. > >I have MixW set up to do PSK31 and MMSSTV does a good job on the SSTV from >ISS, so I'm not completely computer ignorant. >Is there a user friendly packet program, that only requires one download >and has an easy set-up? > >Steve AI9IN Hi Steve, I use two MFJ-1278 multimode TNC's. One for the local network, and one dedicated to satellite. I use an old ms-dos terminal program called cross-talk to handle communications with the controller. This really is the simplest was to do packet, IMO. Used packet TNC's are a dime a dozen. Pick one up, it doesn't have to be a multimode. Use the sound card for the other modes, PSK, SSTV, etc. 73, KB7ADL

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Re: [amsat-bb] FUNcube/AO73 mode switch (Special)
by Andrew Glasbrenner 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

Thank you Jim! A few days ago I was able to complete a QSO with Yuri with AO-73 at just half a degree of elevation, out over the Atlantic. I'm upgrading my 2m antenna soon to circular to help alleviate some of the polarity fading, but it's hard to argue with results like that. I'm very much looking forward to using the new FunCube payloads as they become available. 73, Drew KO4MA -----Original Message----- >From: Jim Heck <jimlist(a)zoho.com> >Sent: Feb 23, 2015 3:39 PM >To: "amsat-bb(a)amsat.org" <amsat-bb(a)amsat.org> >Subject: [amsat-bb] FUNcube/AO73 mode switch (Special) > >Hi Folks, > >Following a special request, I have just switched (approx 2035 UTC) >FUNcube/AO73 into full time transponder mode. This is to facilitate >qso's with Yuri UT1FG/mm currently in the Caribbean. > > Please do not reply to this email address, pls use jim(a)milnet.uk.net. Tks > >73s Jim G3WGM and the FUNcube team. > > > >_______________________________________________ >Sent via AMSAT-BB(a)amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available >to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed >are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the official views of AMSAT-NA. >Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! >Subscription settings: http://amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb

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Portable in CM94
by Jerry Buxton 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

I'll try SO-50 from either Santa Maria or Guadalupe CA CM94 on the ~2100 UTC pass if anyone is interested. Jerry N0JY

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