At 03:21 AM 10/25/2011, Jeff Welsh wrote:

Same here. If I hear a portable station in the FM pileup, most likely that's the one I'll want to work before the others! Working the LEO portable and handheld is quite a handful, literally and I admire that!

Used to do it all the time, quite a lot of fun, and quite an impressive demonstration for lay people, when they see you pointing an antenna at some "random" part of the sky and can hear all those voices from interstate. :)

Probably the most fun I've had working satellites was giving demonstrations at a hamfest. What made this so much fun was it was a team effort by several club members, where we had a couple outside rotating the antennas, while others were inside operating the radio. We did everything manually - antenna pointing, Doppler correction, the works. Worked both FM and SSB/CW birds with that setup, with a lot of success in an environment that turned out to be extremely demanding, from the coordination required, to the high ambient (acoustic) noise level at the operating position. Still, it was a heap of fun. :)

73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com