Congratulations Hector. Glad to see you are still enthusiastically enjoying satellites and sharing that with us.
73s Bob
On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 7:51 AM, Hector W5CBF/CO6CBF kf5yxv@gmail.com wrote:
Hello to all
I am pleased to report that Peter G4DOL and I had another extreme QSO on FO-29. It is my furthest contact on the birds!
Back on October 2013, Peter and I had a very nice contact between EL92sd, Cienfuegos, Cuba and IO80so, Weymouth area, UK. It was a 7286 km contact and probably the first contact between UK and Cuba on FO-29!
Peter and I desired to try again on FO-29, this time between EM21hs, Texas, US and his habitual spot in IO80so. We were able to complete a very nice CW contact on the 92319 orbit of FO-29. Peter had just 0.1 degree as maxim elevation while I had 0.8 during the 80 seconds mutual window. As before, Peter did all the hard work by driving until his habitual spot at a cliff-top and setting up his "portable satellite station" (19 elements Yagi for 435MHz and 10 elements Yagi for 2m both with horizontal polarization). FO-29 was sounding really good on these orbits. It was a solid 559 satellite contact, we were very impressed.
We made the calculations using our 10 digit grid squares at http://no.nonsense.ee/qth/map.html The distance between the stations was 7537.799 km (4683.77 mi). To my knowledge, the longest distance archived on FO-29 until now had been 7,533.685 km between Frank, K4FEG and Erich, DK1TB. http://www.qrz.com/db/k4feg It appears that an even longer distance is achievable. It has been reported that FO-29 has a "theoretical maximum range" of 7502 km, but I guess that at least 7600km is doable. We will try to break our own record!
This contact was possible thanks to the great feature implemented on SatPC32 V12.8b. There is an option of seeing the frequency you are at the satellite receiver at any time during a pass. It allows the operators to tune the right frequencies and attempt a contact without having to search for each other.
We have some pictures, recording and GPS screen shoots. I will try to post everything online. I will be happy to email everything, also.
Thanks very much to Peter for his persistence, effort and all the fun!
73!
Hector, W5CBF/CO6CBF
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