This morning I used the same setup to listen to a 2 deg. max elevation pass of LO-19. Its signal is stronger, of course, but it probably would be less well-suited to demonstration because it sends telemetry periodically, not continuously. It is easy to lose the signal in the doppler as the telemetry goes silent. However, with a practiced hand, familiar with the period of the LO-19 telemetry it is quite possible to record 559-ish copy from this bird without a preamp and with a directly-attached 1/4 wave vertical.
I wonder if one could design a circularly-polarized antenna for 435 MHz that directly attached to the BNC and could be supported by an FT-817...
On Jan 25, 2008 9:28 PM, Bruce Robertson ve9qrp@gmail.com wrote:
I had a chance to do some more listening in on CO-55 using my FT-817 radio and a 1/4 wave ground-plane made of wire and a BNC. Given the number of all-band, all-mode radios that are available now, I think a simple experiment like this could be great fun to many hams, especially those who might fear that satellite operations of any sort are prohibitively expensive. In hopes of illustrating to them and others, I made a short video of the actual reception, to be viewed here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1251407580465862002