[amsat-bb] My first sat QSO

[Hans BX2ABT]

It's been over a year since I decided to get busy with amateur 
satellites, and only now I've made my first sat QSO. For the last couple 
of weeks I have been trying to see which satellites I could reach with 
my home brew 2/70 cross yagis fixed at 20 degrees elevation. AO-91/92 
were possible, but my IC-820H on loan has very low audio on FM, so I 
didn't dare to try. For some reason or another I can't get much signal 
from SO-50, but FO-29 was fine with CW and SSB. I tried Falconsat-3, but 
connecting the PC to the IC-820H is problematic, so I gave up for now.

So Sunday night I was checking out a pass from CAS-4A and heard BD5EUA 
calling CQ in CW. At the spur of the moment I decided to answer him, 
just to see if I could. Well, I could get through the bird, but I was 
too late in answering him and the Doppler compensation didn't work, 
because BD5EUA was drifting up instead of down! Then an hour later, or 
so, a pass from CAS-4B and there he was again, still drifting up. So I 
switched off my Doppler correction and tried to get on his frequency. I 
put out my call and he came back to me with a 599, which I returned to 
him as well. So, yay! My first satellite QSO was in CW, not SSB, FM or 
digital. It wasn't a beauty of a QSO, but it counts.

I made a screen recording of the whole ordeal and you can find it on my 
website: BX2ABT.com or here: https://youtu.be/Z7zRI_ALbpQ. I'm not proud 
of my keying, but I found I got fazed by the delay between my keying and 
the audio that came back from the bird. My first try to do CW over a 
satellite I did so with paddles, which was even worse, so this time I 
used a straight key (Chinese army made, kind of approriate), which I am 
more familiar with. Still, the delay wreaked havoc in my brain. Is the 
solution to turn of the side tone of my rig? Or maybe wearing headphones?

Anyway, it was fun and we'll do it again. Heck, I might even become good 
at this!