Graham Shirville said:

As part of the FUNcube mission team, I can absolutely confirm that it is possible to receive and decode telemetry signals from EO88/Nayif-1 with an omni antenna. Presently AO-73/FUNcube-1 is running only low power telemetry around 30 mW) so is more difficult.

As I said, this was APRS on NO-44 about 20 years ago.

With Nayif you should see upwards of 90 packets received on each good near-overhead pass. The FUNcube system was specifically designed for the telemetry to be easily received at schools and colleges using only simple equipment.

I have made no attempt to do anything with satellites since about 2005 (house issues). Hope to be back within the next year.

The antennas that we use are generally turnstiles. AMSAT-UK used to hold these in stock but, sadly, supply difficulties have made that impossible for the time being.

I tried several antennas including turnstiles, quadrafiller, and simple 1/4 wave verticals.

The possible problems that you may have could be:

Locally high levels of wide band noise...often the case in urban areas

Very likely. I am in the Los Angeles basin, so RF noise levels are high.

A receiver/SDR dongle that does not have sufficient filtering to reject out of band cross modulation etc (The FUNcube Dongle is very good in this respect)

I was using a Midland commercial 2-way radio both with and without a SSB pre-amp at the antenna. This was years before anyone had SDR receivers.

Excessive signal loss in the coax - a filtered preamp will solve this.

All of 25 feet of LMR-400 at 2 meters

A poor antenna!

Reportedly some of the best non-directional satellites antennas at the time. When I used my AO-10 class antennas, it worked great.

73 ----- Jim Walls - K6CCC [email protected]