Dom's advice is spot-on, as usual. If you can't wait for FO-29 to return, you can use the many transmit-only CW birds on 70cm to make sure your 70cm receive set-up is working well. LO-19, for instance, has a booming signal. CO-55, CUTE1-7 and the like have signals from 80-100mW, which a FO-29 capable station should be able to hear very well. If you keep written or mental notes regarding the signal strength of these 'beep sats', and how low on the horizon you can hear them, you should be able to assure yourself that all is well with your station.

These CW signals provide another service for calibrating your station. If you watch the CW signal on the waterfall of an audio decoding program like the free Digital Master 780, you can see how accurate is any Doppler compensation you have. If the result is a signal that varies more than, say 150Hz over the pass, you might want to check either if your clock is accurately set to an NTP server or your location is correctly stated in your Doppler tuning program.

73, Bruce VE9QRP

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 11:18 PM, i8cvs domenico.i8cvs@tin.it wrote:

----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter" roi@optonline.net To: amsat-bb@amsat.org Sent: Friday, August 15, 2008 8:52 PM Subject: [amsat-bb] FO-29

...

Hi,

I was following a 15:46 pass today in NY of FO-29, all my past experience's have been with the FM birds. I am using SatPC32 and LVB tracker, the program went into "Flip" mode at AOS, setting the elevation

at

...

180 degrees. FO-29 passed overhead and I did not hear it, did I miss something in the setup? Thank you.

73, Pete, WB2OQQ

Hi Pete, WB2OQQ

FO-29 was active in all the available Northbound and Southbound orbits to day here over Europe. Even during the Southbound orbits in the night when FO-29 is in ECL signals from the transponder where very strong when I was in QSO with SV1BSX

In order to verify if your receiving system has the needed sensitivity in 70 cm I suggest you to switch your receiver in USB Mode and tune the CW telemetry beacon at 435.795 MHz +/- Doppler

If your receiving system has the right sensitivity you must receive the telemetry beacon constantly from the AOS to LOS without problems.

When FO-29 is orbiting over EU and particularly when the medium EST and Africa are into the footprint the transponder is so sensitive to translate many FM intuders talking into the 2 meters uplink "jamming" our SSB QSO's

By the way the numbar of users of FO-29 is very small because many of them are using not suitable receiving systems so that is very common to hear carriers and lots of CW string of points going up and down into the passband in the attemp to get back their return without success but if you are in conditions to receive the telemetry beacon all the way then you must be able to get back your own signal even using a very low EIRP

For the uplink in 2 meters remember to transmit in LSB because the transponder is "inverting"

I hope this helps

73" de

i8CVS Domenico

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