I had some luck with my AO-40 gear, MMDS downconverter - VK5EME preamp - 3' BBQ grill. But very limited comms. I am at a new location and my antennas and rotators weren't adjusted/calibrated enough for AO-51, and they were only installed last week. Got it sorted by Friday but az is still off by a couple of degrees. I kinda worked VK2RW Reg on the 13SEP06 @ 11:50z, but all we exchanged were call signs and the sat was at it's closest when I heard him/me. Then I lost it. By Friday and the weekend I was getting maybe 50 ~ 60% of the passes to my West, unlike my AO-40 days I have a lot of trees around me up to 30 degrees to my East and 15 degrees to my South.
But it still was very tricky to work or find! SatPC32 couldn't get it right for the Doppler so I used my PCR1000 to find the downlink dialed in the 910 with the AFC on and i was ok from then. My uplink was a IC-T81a with a 16 Watt brick amp into 25 ele loop yagi with the memories set at 10 KHz intervals. So I think I was getting in ok I hope I didn't QRM anyone whilst trying. I have made some recordings of my downlink but it's only me calling CQ I forgot to record the QSO with Reg.
With AO-40 it was easy to see how much error I had with my rotators and LO of my downconverter and so it made it easy to set up software like Satpc32 to accommodate for the difference. It's very hard to get it right will a LEO. I have started looking at S Band GEO sats so that I can remove all the errors in my setup. But all good ham fun I would like to see AO-51 in LS or VS more often in the future. Can AO-51 run LU? And what is the difference between DOVE's downlink and AO-51? DOVE seemed to be a lot stronger.
VK2DAG.