21:51 Thu 18 Jul 19 , Mark D. Johns wrote:
EO-88 is in a low inclination orbit and so stays close to the equator. Many of us in the northern part of the continental U.S. and Canada cannot access it because it never passes far enough north for us to be in the footprint.
Really EO88 has 97deg of inclination, maybe you confuse it with IO86? However some birds are not for all locators, that's true.
That said, it can sometimes be lonely on linear satellites on passes that cover much of the continental U.S. I can’t understand why people would prefer to step all over one another on a single channel FM bird rather than spread out on a nice passband.
I agree, absolutelly. This is the age of "quick&dirty" to be short. More to this: how many qso can be done on a crowded FM sat and how many qso could be done on an even small, say 20kHz, BW of a linear transponder? Maybe ssb voice is not the future, even for ham. Maybe we'll have (soon?) a digital voice satellite on microwave band to be used with phased array antenna (!), maybe. But for now I think linear transponder allow the most valued ham communications.
Yes, the linears require a bit more effort, technical skill, and possibly a bit more of a monetary investment. But by finding some bargains on used gear and learning a bit more about how things work, they are well within reach of the average ham.
Ham is also challanging, right?
73, Lapo IK5NAX