[amsat-bb] Re: ECHO

[Patrick STODDARD (WD9EWK/VA7EWK)]

Hi Pat (and the list)!

> greetings- ECHO has been hugely popular this week with the higher power
> downlink. Thanks to the ops team for conducting this.
> It sounds to me like quite a few people are trying to access the satellite
> during continental US passes.
> I still hear quite a few regulars and very few new people.

There are some newbies on the passes, but the passes are certainly more
crowded than normal this week.  I just worked the 0300 UTC pass this
evening from a city park near my house on the DM33/DM43 boundary,
and the pass covered most of North America... a few Mexicans on at the
start of the pass, lots from across the country throughout the pass, and a
couple of Canadians toward the end.

> How about the regulars take a vacation this weekend so some new people can
> get their first contact?

The regulars are not all bad, Pat.  Many are more than happy to help the
new people make those first contacts.  And without some who are a little
more experienced helping, how do the new people learn?  If you have
worked out the problems with your station that you wrote about in recent
posts to AMSAT-BB in the last week or so, you can help a new satellite
op make his/her first contact.

If I can find an e-mail address for a ham who either said I was their first
(or one of their first) contacts, or if the call is new in my log, I try to
send off an e-mail to thank them and offer an MP3 of the pass so they
can hear themselves as I heard them on my end.  A ham did that for
me when I started out last December (thanks Steve AI7W!), so I could
hear what I sounded like at his station, and it certainly showed me I had
something good with my 5W HT/Yagi portable station on AO-51.

Have you made any headway with the problems you were experiencing
last week or so, that you had posted to the AMSAT-BB about?  If so,
give SO-50 a try late in the afternoons now that its passes are slipping
into that timeframe for North America.  It has a lower power output than
AO-51's normal power level, but still does a decent job.  And that would
be a great test to ensure your station is OK for AO-51 when it goes back
to the normal power level.

73!



Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK - Phoenix, Arizona USA
http://www.wd9ewk.net/