[amsat-bb] Re: There's no usable satellites

[Tony Langdon]

At 03:21 AM 10/25/2011, Jeff Welsh wrote:
>Same here. If I hear a portable station in the FM pileup, most likely that's
>the one I'll want to work before the others! Working the LEO portable and
>handheld is quite a handful, literally and I admire that!

Used to do it all the time, quite a lot of fun, and quite an 
impressive demonstration for lay people, when they see you pointing 
an antenna at some "random" part of the sky and can hear all those 
voices from interstate. :)

Probably the most fun I've had working satellites was giving 
demonstrations at a hamfest.  What made this so much fun was it was a 
team effort by several club members, where we had a couple outside 
rotating the antennas, while others were inside operating the 
radio.  We did everything manually - antenna pointing, Doppler 
correction, the works.  Worked both FM and SSB/CW birds with that 
setup, with a lot of success in an environment that turned out to be 
extremely demanding, from the coordination required, to the high 
ambient (acoustic) noise level at the operating position.  Still, it 
was a heap of fun. :)

73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL
http://vkradio.com