[amsat-bb] Issues with ISS digipeater this morning?

[Mvivona]

Hi Patrick!

My observations are from a non standard source for comparison purposes. I have sort of a unique situation. 
At work we have a 200" tower. At the top of it there is a VHF/UHF repeater antenna that was used for our commercial 450 repeater. I connected an iCom 706 to it through some 250 ft of coax. This is by no means made for satellite work, it's just for me to play with. In comparison to a my HT with an Arrow it is basically deaf. There is no preamp, nor is the antenna matched for 2 meters. There is also a boat load of attenuation down 250 ft of coax. I mainly use it for talking to local repeaters and some simplex work. 
With the old radio setup on the ISS I could easily copy it the moment it crested the horizon. It was full scale by 10 deg high. Since they installed the new radio setup I can barely hear it on a direct overhead pass.  
I have no problem picking it up at home, however my home satellite station has dual high gain yagis, filtered preamps at the antenna all being driven with a rotor, short coax and feeding an iCom 910. 

Michael Vivona
Sent from my iPad

On May 16, 2017, at 3:58 PM, Patrick STODDARD (WD9EWK/VA7EWK) <amsat-bb at wd9ewk.net> wrote:

​Hi Mike!

Until this morning, I'd probably have to disagree with
you on the performance of the ISS digipeater on 145.825
MHz. I think it had been working about as well as it
was before the old VHF radio failed in mid-October. Since
the replacement VHF radio was installed last month, my
issues have been with how stations were clogging the
frequency with mindless beacons - which seems to have
changed over to having more stations trying to work each
other. A good thing. :-)

For me, the only real change for the ISS packet environment
since the replacement VHF radio was installed would be the
deployment of the CubeSats earlier today. I don't know if
those, somehow, are making the VHF radio deaf. It is eerie
to see that the last packet retransmitted by the ISS
digipeater as of now on ariss.net (just before 2000 UTC)
was from my TH-D74 HT several hours ago.

73!





Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK
http://www.wd9ewk.net/
Twitter: @WD9EWK or http://twitter.com/WD9EWK






> On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 10:12 AM, Mike <mvivona at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> My observation has been that the new ISS radio setup is nowhere close to
> what it used to be.
> 
> 
> 
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