Some of you may recall my 'trials and tribulations' post from last week. This is a follow up of sorts. I'm down in DM37 burning a week of vacation time. Prior to leaving home (CN85), I decided to bring my TH D72 and Arrow II along with me -probably to see if getting out of the urban environment would help things. I had a go at one of the FM birds yesterday but was met with more of the same: inability to hear myself on the DL. Spent a good chunk of time last night (re)reading articles and watching videos on everything from compass basics to smartphone tracking apps -HamSat in my case.

Must've paid off, as I finally achieved success today on both AO-91 and SO-50! For the AO-91 pass, I skipped the voice memo app on my iPhone and focused on using HamSat. As a result, I had a MUCH better idea of where to point the antenna -both in terms of az and el- but I'm afraid I've no idea what time I made my two Qs! Later in the day I repeated this approach during the SO-50 pass and again had to estimate the time of the two Qs I made during that pass.

But one thing did not change. I still had great difficulty hearing myself on the DL. Actually, let me clarify that just a bit. There was one point during the AO-91 pass when I caught the briefest of blip)s in my headset. You know... not at all unlike what you'd hear on HF when quickly spinning the VFO up or down the band. (In this case, the 'VFO' was me flipping the antenna round trying to account for Doppler). Unfortunately, by the time I flipped it round the other way, I'd finished my transmission!

I *think* I heard it a bit better later in the day during the SO-5O pass. It went from sounding 'normal' to sounding as though I were speaking while having a head cold. I dunno, maybe I was expecting something a bit louder. My roots are in HF contesting and DXing (cw and rtty) so maybe that was working against me ;)

Observations:

1. There's a LOT to pay attention to during a pass!

2. It's not as easy as John (KG4AKV) makes it look in his videos!! ;)

3. I really need to go the patch cable/splitter route so I can put a voice recorder inline.

4. Even an Arrow II gets heavy after 14 minutes. Gonna have to think about a tripod mount.

73

Ian, K5ZM