[amsat-bb] Re: AO-27 Question

[Greg D.]

Hi Jim,

Interesting...  That was probably the pass I was trying to work AO-27 too, but I didn't have any success at all.  All I got back was hash, with others audible below it.  I think my uplink was interfering my downlink locally, though it went away after the pass.  Gotta work on that.

But, in answer to your question, the satellite has a scheduled sequence that it goes through.  There's a program to predict when the different phases are going to kick in, downloadable from http://sites.google.com/site/ao27satellitescheduler/ and it shows exactly what you and I experienced during the pass.  I suspect it appeared like the satellite turned on with conversations already in progress because they jumped the gun a bit on the uplink, or weren't aware of the timer and were transmitting without being able to hear anything.  The digital parts of the pass are telemetry, and you can decode and contribute what you hear to the archive.  The main page is http://www.ao27.org.

Enjoy,

Greg  KO6TH


> Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:50:49 -0700
> From: kq6ea at pacbell.net
> To: amsat-bb at amsat.org
> Subject: [amsat-bb]  AO-27 Question
> 
> Hi, everybody.
> Today at Field Day was the first time I tried to work AO-27, and succeeded. One thing I noticed, is that as the satellite came up over the horizon, I wasn't hearing anything until what sounded like a long data burst happened. Then I heard the sat come alive, with what sounded like people already in QSO. As the sat progressed, I heard a lot of operators, then the long data burst happened again, and it seemed like the sat went "dead" I know a bit about how it's scheduled (TOPR), but since this is the first time I was able to hear it well enough to actually consider it usable.
> What's the data burst? Is it part of the TOPR, or am I hearing something else?
> 73, Jim  KQ6EA
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