[URC] Suit Sat

[David Basden]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 02:26:31PM +0800, Alwyn Lloyd wrote:
> 
> Awesome.
> 
> 
> > The only problem is that Meryki is due in something like 18 hours,
> > so there's a slight possiblity i'll be busy.
> 
> ooh, well I'm hoping everything works out well on that front :)

Still no baby :) Will be soon hopefully.

> > I've got an FM-92 (with a custom ROM so you can set it's VCO directly)
> > that works well on 2 meters. I've also got a hand-held scanner that
> > will receive FM in the 2m band if anyone wants to borrow it. The
> > only other 2M gear I have is a crystal driven rig, and I don't think
> > it's going to be easy to get hold of a crystal for 145.990MHz in a
> > couple of days.
> 
> The handheld scanner should be enough shouldn't it?   Perhaps with a
> preamp...

The reports are that it is alive, but very, very weak. The recommended
setup is a 12 element yagi with a mast-head pre-amp.

At the same time, the people that are saying this are crack monkeys
living in the US. We live next to the ocean (which aparrently has
good ground plane effects), and we also don't have countless people
filling the 2m band with 2kW transmitters so they can talk to someone
down the road. I've consistently picked up signals that were aparrently
'almost theoretically impossible' if living in the US. Someone in
Melbourne has done the same while sitting on a tram with a HT.

Scanners, especially hand-held scanners have quite crappy sensitivity.
A good tranceiver (which I don't really have for 2m on that freq.) will 
normally give you 10-15dB better.

Give it a go anyhow, about 10 minutes before and after the pass is meant
to be there. Even if the gear you have isn't really good enough, there are
enough variables that might shift things in your favor for a bit.

> 
> Thanks for the links.. something to predict its path will be fairly
> useful.

gpredict is alpha, but seems to work. there are much better out there,
but I haven't had time to look recently.

> As for the polarisation issue, what about circularly polarised antennas?
> aren't they useful for avoinding the changing polarisation issue?
> http://home.comcast.net/~ross_anderson/quadix.htm
> http://www.amsat.org/amsat/articles/houston-net/antenna.html
> 
> according the the articles i have read, they're expecting a 10-15 minute
> window for recieveing..   the park at steves or even james oval would be a
> good location.

It's still up there, will be xmitting for another few days even if it's 
drawing full power. It's really unlikely to be drawing full power, so it
could even be up there another week. Current info is at www.amsat.org,
and up-to-the-minute signal reports are at www.suitsat.org

> and well, i think recording the whole thing would be a good idea.  there
> are 9 different messages... of about 30 seconds duration each.. then a 30
> second gap.  so we'd need 10 minutes of contact time to get it all.... :0

If you can record 10 seconds of telemetry data, you will make the people
at amsat very, very happy. Getting 2 seconds of clear signal is
aparrently an achievement at the moment though.

I'm probably going to keep trying for a while to get something anyhow.
I didn't have much success with the one time I was listening.

David