I heard a couple of nice CW qsos on fo29 just now...they're out there, but not a huge amount of activity. CW gets a bad rap because of a few inconsiderate operators who run WAY too much power. The on/off nature of a cw signal combined with more than a few watts output is very hard on the satellites AGC system, and can make it difficult for other operators to use the transponder. Many people use cw to compensate for poor receive performance at their stations, "pumping" the birds receive AGC with high power and making it generally miserable for all the other operators.

That said, I've made at least one cw qso on fo29, and heard quite a few others that weren't abusing the transponder. When the power is kept down low (I would say maybe 3w or less, depending on the elevation of the bird during the pass) it can work well. No chirp, no hitting the AGC hard, just a good clean downlink signal.

Take a listen around some evening passes, you might hear more than you'd think!

73, - Matthew kk4fem

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 8, 2017, at 22:46, mrtoburen7 mrtoburen7@gmail.com wrote:

Gentlemen, I'm pretty new to sats and very surprised there aren't any CW QSOs. Why? CW is much easier to track than SSB w Doppler. Marshall AA0FO

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