[amsat-bb] Re: Video of indoor, ultra-cheap cubesat operations

[wouter weggelaar]

Hi Bruce,

I think the eggbeater style antenna might do the trick. I don't know
about the BNC on the 817 or how you want the 817 to be oriented, but
it might support the weight of a extra lightweight eggbeater. I'm
building one from solid copper wire of 6mm² (between AWG 9 and 10),
but thats what I have in the junkbox, smaller wire should be no
problem.

The only "difficulty" is to obtain the RG-62 93Ohm Coaxial cable for
phasing, but a few post back some was offered for just postage costs.

My eggbeater is still in trial and error construction phase (which
materials, how to build one?) but it already looks quite nice. There
are a couple of descriptions on the net.

Good luck working the birds from the 817!

73

Wouter PA3WEG



On Jan 26, 2008 1:59 PM, Bruce Robertson <ve9qrp at gmail.com> wrote:
> This morning I used the same setup to listen to a 2 deg. max elevation
> pass of LO-19. Its signal is stronger, of course, but it probably
> would be less well-suited to demonstration because it sends telemetry
> periodically, not continuously. It is easy to lose the signal in the
> doppler as the telemetry goes silent. However, with a practiced hand,
> familiar with the period of the LO-19 telemetry it is quite possible
> to record 559-ish copy from this bird without a preamp and with a
> directly-attached 1/4 wave vertical.
>
> I wonder if one could design a circularly-polarized antenna for 435
> MHz that directly attached to the BNC and could be supported by an
> FT-817...
>
>
>
> On Jan 25, 2008 9:28 PM, Bruce Robertson <ve9qrp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I had a chance to do some more listening in on CO-55 using my FT-817
> > radio and a 1/4 wave ground-plane made of wire and a BNC. Given the
> > number of all-band, all-mode radios that are available now, I think a
> > simple experiment like this could be great fun to many hams,
> > especially those who might fear that satellite operations of any sort
> > are prohibitively expensive. In hopes of illustrating to them and
> > others, I made a short video of the actual reception, to be viewed
> > here:
> > http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1251407580465862002
>
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