[amsat-bb] SO-50 QSO's

[Koos van den Hout]

Quoting John Belstner who wrote on Sun 2014-08-03 at 12:18:

> I heard lots of new calls on SO-50 today and I really wanted to give them a shout back and say welcome.
> Unfortunately, that's about all I heard was a bunch of folks throwing their call sign out.

I have avoided reporting from the European side of working SO-50 for a
while, but this afternoon I heard multiple good QSO's and I could
understand at least one callsign (M0SAT). I tried answering that callsign
2 times but no luck.

It was as busy as could be expected on a Sunday afternoon, but to me it
sounded like everyone was acting fine and those who got across had nice and
short QSOs (callsigns, signal, location).

> On a more serious note, try to hear the downlink first before transmitting.  It reduces QRM and greatly increases your chances of making a QSO!

You could miss your answer, the SO-50 downlink shift seems to me at the
moment bigger than the input width of a normal FM amateur receiver. If I
let gpredict do all the tuning from the specified downlink frequency I hear
nothing. Tune around a bit and I find it and it's busy.

I just noted
http://www.pe0sat.vgnet.nl/satellite/amateur-radio-satellites/so-50/
suggests not correcting for doppler shift on the 2M uplink. Any opinions on
that?

                                              Koos van den Hout PD4KH

-- 
Koos van den Hout,           PGP keyid DSS/1024 0xF0D7C263 via keyservers
koos at kzdoos.xs4all.nl
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