At 01:50 PM 7/31/2007, Greg D. wrote:
Wow, thanks Drew!
What other hobby on the planet can you order up your own personal spaceship (at least, the illusion of it, part time). I feel so powerful!
LOL, I know that feeling. I was doing the scheduling for SO-35 in this part of the world for a few months, until its untimely demise. By making use of my local knowledge, I was able to give a better experience for local hams and take the load off the controllers - they only had to take my times and add that to master schedule on the next command run.
It also had the side effect that I was able to present more information to prospective satellite operators, like AOS, LOS and roughly where in the sky the bird would be during active passes, so a newbie could come up on the air without needing to do more than look at my site.
I also took requests from users into account, when they came. It was a bit of work every couple weeks (especially the presentation side for the web, a LOT of running pass predictions and typing), but it did help a number of people.
73 de VK3JED http://vkradio.com