Since getting the transmitting side functioning I’ve made 1,672 QSOs the main bulk being on AO-51. I was lucky enough to have 385 QSOs on before it finally stopped working in November, this satellite was clearly the most popular because it was easy to access & every pass was busy or more appropriate manic.

With everyone shouting over each other specially at the weekends. The next most popular satellites for me where SO-50 (137 QSOs), VO-52 (143 QSOs) and FO-29 (134 QSOs) nearly matching QSO totals. Sadly out of those three only SO-50 & VO-52 are active due to FO-29 not getting enough sunlight I believe but VO-52 is very reliable every pass for a couple of contacts although sometimes with regular people

Next up is AO-7 with a total of 111 QSOs, this has two modes either a VHF or HF downlink. I only use the VHF downlink but I’ve made two contacts into North America KB1RVT and K3SZH which was exciting and a first for me. Followed by AO-27 (95 QSOs) this again is a reliable FM satellite although turns off early in its pass over Europe, and is plagued with interface from repeaters on its uplink.

Lets not forget SO-67 which I’ve only managed 15 QSOs, and is currently off due to a fault on the satellite but hopefully will be back in the new year if they can fix it. To round things off I’ve been luckily enough to have 5 QSOs on Arissat-1 and collect telemetry and SSTV images. Its due re-enter in the new year but I’m pleased to be able to say and prove that I’ve been able to have a couple of QSOs on this satellite.

In the new year of course comes new satellites with the launch of PW-Sat which is a transponder on board, and hopefully the launch of Funcube and UKube-1 in the later part of the year and not forgetting the Cubesats which transmit useful telemetry to college students round the world working on there research projects.

After spending about a week looking around the internet and reading the The ARRL Satellite Handbook (Highly recommended), I decided to settle on buying a Yaesu G-5500 rotator and a set of Diamond Yagi’s these being a 10 elements on 70cms and 5 elements on 2m not overly large nor crossed but a good starting point.

Once these items had arrived along with large amounts of cables, I got to work setting it all up with the help of my Dad (M3JFM) who was in charge of doing all the soldering work on the plugs and connectors. The antennas are only 17 feet above the ground and not in full clear view but it’s the best it can be for the current location.

Using the Yaesu FT-817 and the FT-7800, I was able to work through the FM satellites easily – at first manually tracking them and leaving the uplink frequency fixed and just adjusting the downlink either by tuning the VFO or using AFC on the radio, but later automated using CAT control and the addition of the Fox delta ST2 tracking unit allowed automated tracking of the antennas which I was using alongside the Ham Radio Deluxe package.

Next stage in the development of the station getting on the SSB satellites and start thinking about being able to-do general SSB/CW contacts on VHF/UHF, yet more research required the black box options seemed to be either a Kenwood TS-2000 which not only did VHF/UHF but HF aswell but I decided I wanted a dedicated radio.

So that only left the ICOM IC-910 after mentioning to Gavin M1BXF that I was after a second-hand one, he soon found me one – from one the Camb-Hams and a price was settled and by Friday the 14th of March 2011. I was heading to Cambridge to pick it up, and operate in the March 144/423MHz contest (in which we came second!) which was also a good time to try the radio out on the 2m position and after working all around Europe I was more than happy!

Next step was actually operating the radio on the SSB satellites, at first I was doing this manually by settling the downlink frequency and adjusting the uplink to make sure it was in the same place. This although worked fine, it wasn’t ideal and using the Ham Radio Deluxes Sat track I couldn’t get automated Doppler correction working to my liking so since June, I’ve switched to using SatPC32 which works far better in my opinion of course everyone’s different so I’d recommend you have a play with all the packages available.

Now I’ve got everything to my liking I can happily work through AO-7, AO-27, AO-51, SO-50, FO-29, VO-52, Arrisat-1 transponders without any problem and have a large amount of QSL cards building up from QSO’s! Looking at my log I’m heading towards a 1000 satellite QSOs this year alone, you can see a pie chart of qsos per sat at http://www.m3php.com/logger/index.php/statistics, or read my regular reports in PW.

What I’ve now been thinking about is how I’m going to take the station forward, what I could really be done with is a couple of preamps for 2m & 70cms and then perhaps look at switching to Wimo X Yagis, this all highly dependent on my bank balance.

This is a recording of the HO-68 CW Beacon as the satellite past over at 35 degrees elevation. Using a ICOM IC-910HX and a 10el 70cms Yagi Az/EL controlled.

I decided to stay up late, to decode the first signal over the United Kingdom. This happened at 3am on the 4th August, when I heard the Voice and then SSTV images on 145.950

The signal wasn’t strong at only 5 degrees elevation but managed to decode an SSTV image, but as you can see plenty fading every couple of seconds. But a couple of hours later I managed to get a slightly better quality image from one of the onboard cameras!

I’ve yet to have an SSB contact via it but hoping that might be possible next week during a non Eclipse pass, and will report if/when that happens.

Equipment

• Yaesu FT-817
• Sota Beam 3 Elements
• Signalink USB
• Software: AGW Packet Engine, UISS & UIView

UI-View Screenshot

Raw Packets

The most important one is the RS0ISS* which is the retransmitted packet.

Fm 2E0SQL To CQ Via ARISS,RS0ISS-4 [12:43:04]
=5145.23N/00114.45W-Hello from Oxford {UIV23}

Fm 2E0SQL To CQ Via ARISS [12:43:24]
=5146.15N/00112.30W-Peter, Oxford {UISS52}

Fm 2E0SQL To CQ Via RS0ISS-4* [12:43:26]
=5146.15N/00112.30W-Peter, Oxford {UISS52}

Findu

Then just after dinner I started hearing things and from then on I was kind of hooked hearing stations using

1. VO52
2. HO-68
3. SO-67

Modes where a mix of CW/SSB not heard anyone on FM yet, signals weren’t great at the best of times but I was using an FT817 + Diamond V2000 vertical and Ham Radio Deluxe satellite tracker but I had fun and will keep playing over the weekend.

Might even try a QSO!

Equipment wise I ordered:

• EUMETCast Key Unit + Software – £85
• DVB World USB Receiver – £60
• Dish (80cm) & Universal LNB – £69.50
• Satellite meter – £25.50
• MSG Toolset Plus* – £117.44

*Included MSG Data Manager, MSG Animator, GeoSatSignal

So the total outlay was £357.44 but in my opinion it was well worth it, there really is nothing like getting weather satellite images of earth from space and watching the weather change over time plus helps improve your geography of knowing where places are located.

As I’ve got the approval from the Eumetsat legal department I’m also able to upload the MSG series images every 6 hours you can find those at http://wx.magicbug.co.uk/msg/images/ I’ve not had time to make a pretty web page for displaying them so its currently just folders but that setup will come in time.

With the QFH its decoding from well above the top of Iceland all the way down to Algeria, and best of all the images are mostly noise free. the antenna is only about 10 feet off the ground attached to the rose arch in the garden.

You can have a look at the images at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/apt/daily/ their uploaded a couple of minutes after each pass automatically by the software.

Afterwards it has the ability to upload the decoded image and provides an RSS feed which can be subscribed to, which is handy as you can view the image on any type of device as long as you have Internet access.

After a week and a half of decoding the results have been relativity good considering its not using a crossed or QFH style antenna, images do have noticeable noise on them but there still usable. and the software has performed without any issues.

You can find the latest images at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/apt/daily/

Mean while Dad set out to listen for the ISS using his VX150 handheld and a SOTA 2m 3el beam, to our surprise this time it wasn’t transmitting SSTV but was being manned by one the guys on board! perhaps if I knew before hand I might have tried to get a QSO!

The audio file will be here soon!

After about 6 minutes the pass was over but we had a blast receiving We then caught a later pass around at around 13:48 this time round it was SSTV so after the audio was recorded we fed the audio back into Dads laptop and using HRDs DM780 SSTV decoder we got the following two pictures.