Hello All,
The reloading of AO-51 is essentially complete; the bird is in good order. A side effect of the crash/reload is that the mode change to S-band has been delayed--until now.
We are going to resume the scheduling of AO-51 with the following changes: the power budget should allow the simultaneous operation of both the S-band and U-band transmitters. The tradeoff is that the U-band will be low in power-around 250 mW or so.
Also, please notice the use of the 145.880 MHz uplink!
This is a great time to work on improving the sensitivity of your receiver setups! The 250 mW will challenge some of you for sure. PLEASE be sure to follow the "if you can't hear it, don't try to uplink" basic rule of satellite operation.
If the satellite supports the dual downlink mode OK, we may extend the V/S-U mode a few days past the original mode schedule in order to give mode S operators a fair shake at some operations and testing--while at the same time allowing some low power mode V/U operations!
September 29 (around 2120 utc)
FM Repeater, V/S-U Uplink: 145.880 MHz FM (no PL tone) Downlinks: 2401.200 MHz FM *and* 435.300 MHz FM (at low power!)
Mark L. Hammond [N8MH]