[amsat-bb] Re: S band downlink on P3E

[Andrew Glasbrenner]

Rick,

I am in _TOTAL_ agreement. I live in the suburbs of Tampa/St. Pete and never 
had an interference problem on my 3 foot dish. I have used the same dish to 
log well over a dozen WiFi access points in that immediate neighborhood. 
With properly designed equipment, all that trash on 2.4 ghz goes away with 
some elevation. What won't work is helixes with multiple sidelobes, and 
surplus dishes that let one whole polarity of noise right thru the back.

Everyone knows I'm a big supporter of AMSAT, but I gotta call it as I see 
it. It makes me think of "bait and switch" to collect money for a project 
featuring such a popular mode and then drop it.

The loss of Mode B on AO-40 caused a lot of the hardcore AO-10/AO-13 types 
to walk away, and that was tough to overcome. Now that we have, and we have 
people wanting S band, we leave them behind too. Even if it's a sound 
engineering decision (and that hasn't been proven to me) it's a horrid 
marketing decision. Bad mojo for a organization that lives on the donations 
of it's members.

Sorry if this causes any pain to those involved with Eagle, but I needed to 
get it off my chest.

73, Drew KO4MA
AMSAT LM 2332


>While AO-40 was still alive and I was working it from deep within "Silicon
>Valley", an area blanketed by WiFi, 2.4GHz cordless phones, etc., I
>discovered that a parabolic dish with a properly positioned and designed
>patch feed (slightly under-illuminating the dish and having no significant
>side-lobes) would bring in AO-40's S-band downlink very nicely and cleanly.

>Of course, other feed or antenna types such as helical antennas/feeds were
>useless in that environment.

>I have to admit that I don't buy the "too noisy" argument.

>73,

>Rick
>KG6IAL