My My . all of these great memories of long ago makes me suggest I have to hark back to my first Q on a satellite. That event that leaves you so high it takes a couple of day to join the rest of the human race. That Q was after designing and constructing a 2 meter SSB transverter, preamp and antennas Now it needs to be said that living in NE in 1965 and getting the bug to accomplish this is with out elmers or help of commericial equipment . I point that out because NE was the last state I needed to work WAS years later The HB 2 mtr preamp was a 7077 ceramic that was sweet as it could be. The HB 2 mtr transverter was a 6360 tube that also was a marvel back then. Naturally I needed a SSB HF rig to drive the transverter and that was an Hallicrafters HT-37 Oscar III had a 2 meter transponder with 50 KHz wide The uplink was on 146 MHz and the down link was on 144 MHz . During these day getting information about Ham satellite activity in NE was almost impossible We were able to learn the time and longitude that the bird was next crossing the equator. I took a school Globe, seperated the two halves of the globe, set the northern half on a board so I could rotate the globe to a index on the board That index was aligned with the longitude of the next pass . A wire also beginning at that index crossed over the globe to the correct location on the other side which represented the path about the globe for the bird. String knots tied to the wire at each location equaling about ten minutes flight represented time along the path.
All of this 1965 effort for a 18 day battery to run the Oscar III 2 Mtr transponder.
Then the newer birds each in it's own time with all the learning and enjoyment Along came the French Mode S Arsene, as I recall there were 4 Hams in the US that worked that bird Stations in FL , CA, NY and NE She was upside down and got to hot to last.
Then the last HEO AO-40, Over 200 DXCC entities confirmed on satellite. All but one zone (34) via satellite confirmed WAS # 109
Enjoyment I have had plenty. I have also paid my share into the fund to build and launch AO-40 It was not cheap if you want what I wanted.
The above makes me old with the old junk out in the shack 13 last Sept. a 40 minute , 108 MPH hail storm made 19 antennas in my back yard useless. My insurance Co has already spent over 50 grand on my place without getting into any Ham antennas. I am not sure I will match Dave or Dan's ability to wait for P3E and rebuild my earth station.
I suggest that this is not one of those "Build it and they will come"
Time will tell !
Joe Murray K0VTY Amsat 860 ================ On Sat, 05 Feb 2011 15:40:46 -0900 "Edward R. Cole" [email protected] writes:
At 03:08 PM 2/5/2011, Bill Dzurilla wrote:
I've been enjoying the posts regarding our last HEO satellite, AO-40. I was inactive while AO-40 was going strong, but the posts
brought back memories of our first HEO, OSCAR 10, my first experience with satellites until a couple of years ago. You can't
find much about the glory days of AO-10 on the web, but I remember
them well.
Passes lasted for 8 hours. Always Q5 copy everywhere in the huge footprint, very little QRM or QRN. I worked over 100 countries
from
1983-85, but never got enough cards for DXCC. My rig was a Yaesu FT-726R with a Mirage D-1010 amp. It was 70cm uplink, 2 meters downlink. I attached the antennas to a small mast on my chimney.
I
had a surplus cavity bandpass filter that wiped away all the birdies; it was needed because I lived in EL49 in New Orleans. The
antennas were small crossed-yagis (KLM?), circularly polarized, on
separate booms. I can't recall the make or model. Also must have
had a mast-mounted preamp and an az-el rotator, but I can't
remember
them. I got the tracking info from a program that ran on my Commodore 64 and printed it out on my Gorilla Banana printer.
Those were halycon days, with AO-10 supposed to be just the beginning. The grand plan was to put up 3 linked ham sats in geosynchronous orbit, which would enable any ham to work any other
ham anywhere on the globe 24-7. Will we ever see anything like
that
again? How did AO-10 compare with AO-40?
There was a fire at my home and all my logs and QSL cards from
those
days were lost. If anyone out there happens to have an old AO-10 QSL card from me, I'd sure appreciate a copy.
73, Bill NZ5N
Sent via [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the
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AO-10 in the mid-1980's was my first real satellite operation (I had
been involved with AO-6). It was the basic mode-B linear transponder. Great range and lots of DX. I worked some rare DX that was rare on HF standards. The hams I worked said they were tired of
the pileups on HF and came up on AO-10 to enjoy some nice contacts.
P3E inherits the legacy of AO-10 and AO-13, as it is very similar in
what it is equipped to do. ARISSat-1 will be a precurser for what P3E would be without the high orbit.
73, Ed - KL7UW, WD2XSH/45
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