Diane,
I'm not sure if I agree, but I am very willing to discuss. In past years I have taken many flames for demonstrating satellites to scouts and other visitors at our site because it always resulted in the one contact rule being broken. This year I had the satellite gear operational for maybe 10 minutes to assemble the Arrow, connect the handheld, make the contact, disassemble the Arrow and put it all away.
It was easy, but not much of a demonstration. The 100 point bonus was the only reason for our doing it. Unless you have lots of folks at your Field Day site with nothing to do, there is no real reward to having an OSCAR station.
This is coming from someone who would still call themselves a satellite enthusiast.
73, Joe kk0sd
-----Original Message----- From: amsat-bb-bounces@amsat.org [mailto:amsat-bb-bounces@amsat.org] On Behalf Of Diane Bruce Sent: Monday, June 27, 2011 4:19 PM To: wa4hfn@comcast.net Cc: AMSAT Subject: [amsat-bb] Re: FD Mess
On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 03:13:34PM +0000, wa4hfn@comcast.net wrote:
It took me 5 satellite passes before I could make 1 contact There were too
many ops making what sounded like HI POWER multi contacts .This should not have happened. Maybe someone with good writting skills could send the ARRL world above 50 an artical on how to work the birds during FD
WA4HFN em55 Damon
I know I am going to get hate mail again. I just know it. But here goes. I've been quietly suggesting that we should _not_ be encouraging sat use during field day, furthermore we probably should consider turning them off during field day to stop this.
Now hear me out before you hit that reply key. Field day operators are interested in those bonus points, we (amsat) are interested in promoting amateur radio sat operations. How many of these field day operations actually result in new satellite operators? Where are the surveys, stats? Does the extra massive battery use of our sats justify the PR? Keep in mind the state of AO-51 and FO-29.
Am I the only one? I'd be interested in a non-flame war discussion.
- 73 Diane VA3DB