Being so big into satellite work, Brad, you should get involved with WMPLOTA! See http://wmplota.org/
Larry WA9TT
On 4/26/2018 11:51 AM, Mr B r a d wrote:
Funny story I just got my first hand held sat antenna last week , the ELK and I'm out in the yard trying to get the hang of using it with my cheap btec x3 FM HT , no FM birds are up so I am punching in cw beacons of the birds in view and having pretty good luck detecting the CW pulsing swish-swish sound in the FM receiver and getting the feel for aiming the antenna while watching the tiny screen on my smart phone for aiming data.... then FO29 comes in view , A sat I have a really hard time hearing on my little home station yagi , so im able to just detect fo-29 beacon , just bearly on on my FM HT , and as the sat get in close ( overhead ) I can start to hear some voice signals decoding ?? since thats a SSB bird , i guess the ht's wide 20kc 'IF' signals are mixing with the CW carrier and sort of mixing up and giving me a poor mans SSB audio decode ... this made me think back to my early days as a kid when i would use a old rf-generator on the bench to beat a carrier up on HF SSB signals to get them to decode on a old AM only shortwave radio I had .... If the HT could run in AM mode it might work even better. so if folks worked SSB near the low end of the transponder voices might mix with the beacon and decode for the ht's?
Brad Ko6kL