We managed 21 contacts in all... one on each FM bird and the remainder on the linear sats. And all in spite of several visits from Mr. Murphy and his extended family:
We ran N3FJP network logging for the first time, with MS NetMeeting as a chat client, and either one of them was conflicting with SatPC32, or my poor old Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop was just not up to the task. Every so often when I changed satellites, or changed CAT selections for a given satellite, SatPC32 would throw an access violation error. Seemed to keep working okay, though. Then I had an issue where the radio kept coming up in "Normal" tracking mode, even when it should have be in "Reverse" tracking mode, followed by 3 "serious error" blue screen reboots. My rotor has a bad spot on the azimuth position pot, so every once in a while, it would go zooming off target and I'd have to go manual; the mic boom broke off my headphones, and of course, it wouldn't be Field Day in Chicagoland without severe thunderstorms rolling thru at some point (Sunday morning - took us off the air for about an hour and a half).
I was very impressed at how well AO-7 held up under the abuse she was subjected to. There were a couple of stations that had the poor old girl FM'ing so bad you couldn't even understand them, and one CW station that chirped so bad I swear they were keying an FM rig on the uplink! AO-51 V/S was a treat, and some observers couldn't believe how strong the downlink was with just a corner reflector on the K5GNA downconverter. Nice to have SO-67 back, too!
George, KA3HSW (Satellite op for W9CCU, 5A, IL)
----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrew Koenig" andrewkoenig@thathamkid.com To: davekn4ok@aol.com Cc: amsat-bb@amsat.org Sent: Monday, June 28, 2010 5:05 PM Subject: [amsat-bb] Re: field day
Field day was quite amazing down here in Houston too. I was one of the operators for K5HOU. I had never heard SO-50 with so many people! I tried 3 passes, 2 of which were on SO-50, and we didn't make a single contact, but we still had a ton of fun trying.
On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 3:59 PM, davekn4ok@aol.com wrote:
We had a Blast also during FD! I was one of the ops from our club station (K4BFT Big Fat Turkey) and worked many of you. I think AO-51 sounded more like ch 19! LOL LOL
Dave, kn4ok