Will do Drew. Especially if I hear him on AO-16. I knew it had a good receive, but wow, the transmit was good so that I could hear it on my crummy verticals. I really do need to get the arrays back up that have been down since the storms of '04' and I'm finding that a couple of birds it would be very beneficial (especially for AO-7). Again, I took my power into a homebrew 1/4 ground plane down to 5 watts and was still hearing quite a signal. My goal is to try and use this bird as much as I can until it goes away.
Again Drew, thanks for your and other's efforts on this. It really makes operating the birds fun. Especially when those of us are too lazy to put the better antenna up or back up, hi.
Andrew Glasbrenner wrote:
My pleasure Reid. Up until today I had been optimistic about maybe eeking some sort of continuing operation out of AO-16, but this pass has sort of killed that. We had been getting an orbit or two between shutdowns the last week or so, which led me to think if we could enable it every orbit we'd extend operations. Right now the satellite is in about 79% sun, by this summer that will drop to 68%. Illumination equals heat, and our reset problem is temperature dependent. The temperatures have already dropped enough that the satellite reset twice during that pass; the time you heard, and about 30 seconds after I first turned it on it did the same.
So...we'll have to see if even a large effort will result in any sort of usable operations as we approach that 68% number.
73, Drew KO4MA AMSAT-NA VP Operations
PS Be sure to thank Mark, N8MH, when you hear him on the air. He is usually the one that turns the satellite on in the afternoons, not me!
----- Original Message ----- From: "w4upd" updwrb@bristor-assoc.com To: "Amsat-Bb@Amsat. Org" amsat-bb@amsat.org Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2008 3:58 PM Subject: [amsat-bb] AO-16 back on and very strong
Thanks to the control station turning AO-16 back on. Heard the sequence and then the bird was really kicking butt on its signal. I lowered my power to 5 watts and was still banging in and this with some very "bad" verticals that I have difficulty with on the other birds. Heard to satellite quit during the pass and then obviously, control station came back and turned it on again. Other then some "junk" only a couple of stations were on.
I had a choice of AO-16 or SO-50. No brainer, stuck with AO-16. Good work fellows,
73, Reid, W4UPD
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