XW-1 was again heard over western North America with an excellent signal. The new keps provided by Nigel G8IFF/W8IFF were used for Object A and found to be spot on. I set SatPC32 for automatic operation with the TS2000 in the CW mode and the computer clock synchronized with NIST. I never touched the radio dial or the antennas during the entire pass and as you will hear on the recording, the CW tone never changed. The TS2000 was updating the frequency every second.

Again I found polarization shifts but the bird did best on Left Hand during most of the pass. This was a 22 degree pass for me to the west.

One of the three letter code groups changes on every string of CW starting with BJ1SA XW XW etc and ending with XW XW. For example, the 3 letter groups for some successive transmissions were: TNE TDT AAE ATE 4VE A6E TBT 4VE T6E ATE. Every other code group in the string stayed the same, at least during this pass.

I started the recording late. It is much better than my first recording with the older keps on the amsat webpge.

http://www.papays.com/XW-1_15Dec2009_170842z.mp3

Let's hope we can start using the v/u transponders for voice/cw soon.

Thanks again to all who were involved with this satellite. It is operating very well.

73, John K8YSE EN91dh