Hi!

One of the items in yesterday's ANS bulletin described a flyer that is now available from AMSAT's web site, available at:

http://www.amsat.org --> Satellite Info --> Station and Operating Hints.

(or at the direct link is http://www.amsat.org/?page_id=2144 )

I am not the only author of these flyers. Back in 2008, Gould Smith WA4SXM asked Tim Lilley N3TL and me to work with him on the original version of this flyer for use by AMSAT's Area Coordinators. Gould and Tim were most helpful in this project, and I thank them for their contributions. Over the next 6+ years, this flyer has been revised several times. Until AMSAT's old web site was shut down a couple of years ago, updated versions were available in a special section of that site used by Area Coordinators. With the changes related to the web site in the past couple of years, that private area for Area Coordinators has not been recreated, and we're taking the opportunity to make the flyer available to everyone. This is probably long overdue, as the information has been available in many places (including AMSAT's "Getting Started with Amateur Satellites" books, available at AMSAT booths/tables and from AMSAT's online store).

Since I live in Arizona, with many hamfests in close proximity to the Mexican border, many Mexican hams come up to these hamfests. I asked a couple of friends, Larry Teran KI6YAA and Alex Pereida XE2BSS/N2IX, to translate this flyer into Spanish in 2011, which was a great help. My grasp of Spanish is OK (some of you hear me speaking Spanish when I work stations in Mexico and central America), but I was not comfortable translating the flyer by myself. After Larry and Alex did the initial Spanish translation in 2011, I have been able to update the Spanish version as the English version was updated.

A separate flyer is already in the works for the Fox-1A satellite, which will be available before the satellite's scheduled launch date in late August. Between content for the AMSAT web site and articles in upcoming issues of the AMSAT Journal, there will be lots of information about Fox-1A available. Once we see how well Fox-1A works, that information will be incorporated in both the English and Spanish versions of this flyer, and posted on the AMSAT web site. We're starting to take advantage of how easy it is to make documents available on the AMSAT web site, using the WordPress content management system. This has been done with many documents related to the Fox project already, and we will continue to do this in the future.

If anyone wishes to translate this flyer into other languages, that would be great. Please e-mail me directly, so we can discuss this in more detail. Any additional translations will be posted on the AMSAT web site, along with the existing English and Spanish versions.

Thanks, and 73!

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