Hi Pat (and the list)!
greetings- ECHO has been hugely popular this week with the higher power downlink. Thanks to the ops team for conducting this. It sounds to me like quite a few people are trying to access the satellite during continental US passes. I still hear quite a few regulars and very few new people.
There are some newbies on the passes, but the passes are certainly more crowded than normal this week. I just worked the 0300 UTC pass this evening from a city park near my house on the DM33/DM43 boundary, and the pass covered most of North America... a few Mexicans on at the start of the pass, lots from across the country throughout the pass, and a couple of Canadians toward the end.
How about the regulars take a vacation this weekend so some new people can get their first contact?
The regulars are not all bad, Pat. Many are more than happy to help the new people make those first contacts. And without some who are a little more experienced helping, how do the new people learn? If you have worked out the problems with your station that you wrote about in recent posts to AMSAT-BB in the last week or so, you can help a new satellite op make his/her first contact.
If I can find an e-mail address for a ham who either said I was their first (or one of their first) contacts, or if the call is new in my log, I try to send off an e-mail to thank them and offer an MP3 of the pass so they can hear themselves as I heard them on my end. A ham did that for me when I started out last December (thanks Steve AI7W!), so I could hear what I sounded like at his station, and it certainly showed me I had something good with my 5W HT/Yagi portable station on AO-51.
Have you made any headway with the problems you were experiencing last week or so, that you had posted to the AMSAT-BB about? If so, give SO-50 a try late in the afternoons now that its passes are slipping into that timeframe for North America. It has a lower power output than AO-51's normal power level, but still does a decent job. And that would be a great test to ensure your station is OK for AO-51 when it goes back to the normal power level.
73!
Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK - Phoenix, Arizona USA http://www.wd9ewk.net/