November should be a great Mobile Satellite Month.
There are 7 satellites you can work from your mobile FM rig, including PCSAT-1 which should fully recover by this weekend and last for 2 or more weeks. So now is the time to get going with live satellite contacts via these easy FM satellites, or setting up a SATGATE (Igate).
DOWNLINK SATELLITE -------- ------------------------------------- 145.825 ISS APRS digipeater 145.825 PCSAT-1 (recovery expected 3 Nov) 145.825 ANDE-1 (re-entry expected next month) 435.225 GO-32 +/- 10 KHz and 9600 baud
435.300 AO-51 *FM Voice* +/- 10 KHz 436.795 SO-50 *FM Voice* +/- 10 KHz 436.795 AO-27 *FM Voice* +/- 10 KHz
As you can see, there will be over 40 passes per day with 18 for the 1200 baud satellites, 6 per day for the 9600 baud GO32 and 18 for the voice birds. All 1200 baud pass times are between about 6 AM to 1800 local sun time in the Northern Hemisphere. GO-32 and AO-51 voice birds are in the morning and evening, AO-27 is in the afternoon. It is trivial to know when to operate these birds WITHOUT A PC. Please see the manual-tracking page: http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/MobileLEOtracking.html
The packet path on 145.825 is VIA ARISS for all three satellites. The path for GO-32 is VIA 4XTECH and uses two different uplinks: 145.85 for APRS software and messages. 145.93 for all Mic-E, D7 and D700 radios.
That's more than one pass per hour on 145.825. Lots of contact potential from your mobile...
For APRS birds: http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/pcsat.html http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/iss-faq.html http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/ande-ops.html http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/GO32-ops.html
For AMSAT birds: http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/satellites/status.php
For many of these satellites, you don't even need a tracking program. Just a slip of paper on the dashboard... See: http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/MobileLEOtracking.html
The best antenna is a 19.5" whip in the center of your roof. 5 dBi gain on the 2m uplink and almost 8 dBi gain for the very weak UHF downlink (above 25 degrees)...
Watch for special event info.
WB4APR, Bob