[amsat-bb] Probably FO-29 world distance record; QSO between US and UK

[Robert McGwier]

Congratulations Hector. Glad to see you are still enthusiastically enjoying
satellites and sharing that with us.

73s
Bob


On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 7:51 AM, Hector W5CBF/CO6CBF <kf5yxv at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello to all
>
> I am pleased to report that Peter G4DOL and I had another extreme QSO on
> FO-29.  It is my furthest contact on the birds!
>
> Back on October 2013, Peter and I had a very nice contact between EL92sd,
> Cienfuegos, Cuba and IO80so, Weymouth area, UK. It was a 7286 km contact
> and
> probably the first contact between UK and Cuba on FO-29!
>
> Peter and I desired to try again on FO-29, this time between EM21hs, Texas,
> US and his habitual spot in  IO80so. We were able to complete a very nice
> CW
> contact on the 92319 orbit of FO-29. Peter had just 0.1 degree as maxim
> elevation while I had 0.8 during the 80 seconds mutual window.  As before,
> Peter did all the hard work by driving until his habitual spot at a
> cliff-top and  setting up his "portable satellite station"  (19 elements
> Yagi for 435MHz and 10 elements Yagi for 2m both with  horizontal
> polarization). FO-29 was sounding really good on these orbits. It was a
> solid 559 satellite contact, we were very impressed.
>
> We made the calculations using our 10 digit grid squares at
> http://no.nonsense.ee/qth/map.html The distance between the stations was
> 7537.799 km (4683.77 mi). To my knowledge,  the longest distance archived
> on
> FO-29 until now had been 7,533.685 km between Frank, K4FEG and Erich,
> DK1TB.
> http://www.qrz.com/db/k4feg It appears that an even longer distance is
> achievable. It has been reported that FO-29 has a "theoretical maximum
> range" of 7502 km, but I guess that at least 7600km is doable. We will try
> to break our own record!
>
> This contact was possible thanks to the great feature implemented on
> SatPC32
> V12.8b. There is an option of seeing the frequency you are at the satellite
> receiver at any time during a pass. It allows the operators to tune the
> right frequencies and attempt a contact without having to search for each
> other.
>
> We have some pictures, recording and GPS screen shoots. I will try to post
> everything online. I will be happy to email everything, also.
>
> Thanks very much to Peter for his persistence, effort and all the fun!
>
> 73!
>
> Hector, W5CBF/CO6CBF
>
>
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-- 
Bob McGwier
Co-Founder and Technical Director, Federated Wireless, LLC
Research Professor Virginia Tech
Senior Member IEEE, Facebook: N4HYBob, ARS: N4HY
Faculty Advisor Virginia Tech Amateur Radio Assn. (K4KDJ)