It's been over a year since I decided to get busy with amateur satellites, and only now I've made my first sat QSO. For the last couple of weeks I have been trying to see which satellites I could reach with my home brew 2/70 cross yagis fixed at 20 degrees elevation. AO-91/92 were possible, but my IC-820H on loan has very low audio on FM, so I didn't dare to try. For some reason or another I can't get much signal from SO-50, but FO-29 was fine with CW and SSB. I tried Falconsat-3, but connecting the PC to the IC-820H is problematic, so I gave up for now.

So Sunday night I was checking out a pass from CAS-4A and heard BD5EUA calling CQ in CW. At the spur of the moment I decided to answer him, just to see if I could. Well, I could get through the bird, but I was too late in answering him and the Doppler compensation didn't work, because BD5EUA was drifting up instead of down! Then an hour later, or so, a pass from CAS-4B and there he was again, still drifting up. So I switched off my Doppler correction and tried to get on his frequency. I put out my call and he came back to me with a 599, which I returned to him as well. So, yay! My first satellite QSO was in CW, not SSB, FM or digital. It wasn't a beauty of a QSO, but it counts.

I made a screen recording of the whole ordeal and you can find it on my website: BX2ABT.com or here: https://youtu.be/Z7zRI_ALbpQ. I'm not proud of my keying, but I found I got fazed by the delay between my keying and the audio that came back from the bird. My first try to do CW over a satellite I did so with paddles, which was even worse, so this time I used a straight key (Chinese army made, kind of approriate), which I am more familiar with. Still, the delay wreaked havoc in my brain. Is the solution to turn of the side tone of my rig? Or maybe wearing headphones?

Anyway, it was fun and we'll do it again. Heck, I might even become good at this!