Hi!

It has been almost 4 months since AO-92 was opened up for general use, and the first L/V activation. I have tried to work the L/V configuration anytime it is active, whether I am home or away from home. I have worked approximately 20 different stations over this time. Most of the time, I have used a 5-element Comet CY-1205 Yagi with my Alinco DJ-G7T HT for my 1.2 GHz uplink. Sometimes, I go with a Chinese-made 10-element Yagi I ordered from an eBay seller.

From working different stations across the country, it seems like other

stations I work are using larger antennas than mine - maybe the same 10-element Yagi I use, the 16-element Comet CYA-1216E Yagi, Yagis with more than 16 elements, or some have used a helix. My question is this: other than the HT duckies used by a couple of stations early on, does anyone besides me use an antenna smaller than a 10-element Yagi to work AO-92 L/V? If so, what are you using? I am not so concerned about transmitter power, as there are a few of us using HTs with 1W output on the 1.2 GHz band, and we are able to work AO-92 at that power level.

A comment about the AO-92 pass around 1625 UTC this morning...

This was not a high pass out here in Arizona, with maximum elevation around 13 degrees to the east. I have worked stations to the east around this elevation in the past, so I went out to try for more contacts. Near the midpoint of the pass here, I heard a station make 2 long CQ calls on the pass. There should be no need to make CQ calls, let alone long CQ calls, on any FM satellite. The 145.880 MHz AO-92 downlink is easy to hear. There are ample opportunities to get this set up, by working other AO-92 passes in the normal U/V configuration. If the issue is getting the uplink frequency and/or antenna aligned with the satellite, full-duplex operation should ensure that there is no need for a long transmission to be heard through the satellite.

If you want to hear the audio I recorded from this pass, it is in my Dropbox space at http://dropbox.wd9ewk.net/ . Look in the Satellite_Audio-2018 folder, and find the MP3 file with the name starting with "20180527-1626UTC47" for the recording.

73!

Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK http://www.wd9ewk.net/ Twitter: @WD9EWK or http://twitter.com/WD9EWK