Hello fellow AMSAT'ers,
I just wanted to send out a quick thanks to all for supporting the camera passes over the last couple days. We did a demo here at VT on 7/12 for a large group of Middle Schoolers and they were definitely wowed by the Camera images. We were also able to monitor a bit of audio on the FM downlink as the satellite rose on Blacksburg, but before it was kicked into Camera Mode. I was able to show them the footprint with our tracking program and explained how we wouldn't start to see images until the footprint crossed into Florida in order for Drew to kick the bird into camera mode. Before the pass I had them guess what kinds of things we might see, and they were pretty excited when they saw their guesses were pretty close (clouds, coastlines, ocean, etc........one kid was disappointed that there were no aliens...:-) ).
While we were able to get a good number of images direct in Blacksburg (including the shot of Cape Cod, Pic 86), it was very reassuring to know if I bungled the local station demo that I could jump to the website and show them images there collected from the community! So many thanks to all out there for the backup. And many thanks to Drew and the Ops Team for accommodating us with the Camera Mode request. It felt really great showing kids visiting VT images from Space from a camera built at VT!
Overall great success!.....Made possible in no small part thanks to the entire AMSAT community. So on behalf of VT....THANK YOU !!!!!
-Zach, KJ4QLP