It has been a lot of fun to have both the ISS and NO-84 (PSAT) satellite digipeaters active this week and to make a few contacts on both! Last night around 23:25z (and possibly again tonight), their footprints were overlapping as they headed over the Atlantic from my QTH in FN85 Nova Scotia, Canada).
I was not aware of the overlap at the time and had missed the ISS pass, but got to the computer just as PSAT was passing over and my station received packets from CT1EBQ in Portugal followed by EB2CDU in Spain. At first I thought that they had come through the APRS-IS (internet) network, but looking more closely at the packets I saw the digipeater path showed NA1SS,PSAT,ARISS* indicating they had made two hops through the two satellite digipeaters on their path to me. I checked the screen on GPredict and sure enough there was an overlap. Of course, I quickly tried to add a second "ARISS" to my digipeater path and reply with a message, but to my knowledge (and not surprisingly) I did not get back through. It was still neat to see this happen and to receive the messages!
I shared a photo on a Twitter post (https://twitter.com/ve1cwj/status/1374892472413851648?s=20), but thought I would share it here too in case some other non-Twitter satellite hams might be interested and I see that Bob Bruninga, WB4APR, is sometimes active on the AMSAT-BB. I did receive a reply on Twitter from Ricardo, CT1EBQ, who sent one of the packets from Portugal, which was pretty neat.
I see there is a similar opportunity for a double hop again this evening with the track heading more toward the UK and NO-84 in the lead this time, so who knows! I'll try to be a little bit better prepared if it happens again.
73,
John
VE1CWJ