[amsat-bb] hearing SSB on my FM HT

[Larry Peterson]

Being so big into satellite work, Brad, you should get involved with 
WMPLOTA!   See http://wmplota.org/

Larry WA9TT


On 4/26/2018 11:51 AM, Mr B r a d wrote:
> Funny story
> I just got my first hand held sat antenna last week , the ELK
> and I'm out in the yard trying to get the hang of using it
> with my cheap btec x3 FM HT , no FM birds are up
> so I am punching in cw beacons of the birds in view
> and having pretty good luck detecting the CW
> pulsing swish-swish sound in the FM receiver and getting the feel for
> aiming the antenna while watching the tiny screen on
> my smart phone for aiming data.... then FO29
> comes in view , A sat I have a really hard time hearing
> on my little home station yagi , so im able to just
> detect fo-29  beacon , just bearly on on
> my FM HT , and as the sat get in close ( overhead )
> I can start to hear some voice signals decoding ??
> since thats a SSB bird , i guess the ht's wide 20kc 'IF' signals
> are mixing with the CW carrier and sort of mixing up
> and giving me a poor mans SSB audio decode ...
> this made me think back to my early days as a kid when i
> would use a old rf-generator on the bench to beat a
> carrier up on HF SSB signals to get them to decode
> on a old AM only shortwave radio I had ....
> If the HT could run in AM mode it might work even better.
> so if folks worked SSB near the low end of the transponder
> voices might mix with the beacon and decode for the ht's?
>
> Brad
> Ko6kL
>
>