Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Tracking

Really excited about a new project: The TAPR Trakbox





While no longer sold/made, I recently purchased a "new in box" kit, and plan on
mating this up with the KR500 el / and a CDE/Hy-Gain az, rotor combo, in conjunction with the
FT-736.

This will up my ability to do winter, nighttime, sat work, since that seems to be the
time when I have the most free slots, and will save having to stand outside in the weather.

Description from TAPR:


The trakbox is a self-contained, stand-alone accessory for use with satellite stations. You simply select the satellite you wish to track from a front panel control and the TrakBox will steer your antennas in both azimuth and elevation to track the selected satellite when it is or above your horizon. In addition, if you have a radio with a computer interface, the TrakBox will tune your transmitter and receiver and correct them for doppler shift.
Trakbox includes a serial port to allow you to set the real-time clock (which is battery backed), your station location (latitude, longitude and elevation) and the keplerian elements for the satellites you are interested in (up to 40 satellites may be loaded, and the elements may be uploaded in ASCII in either the AMSAT or NASA formats). A two-line LCD display is updated every second, showing the azimuth and elevation of a satellite, along with the satellite ID and GMT. Once set up, TrakBox no longer needs to be connected to any other computer to operate.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

How To Work The Sats

In case you are looking for information on how to work the Amateur Radio Satellites, there are a few excellent resources.

AMSAT

The main resource available to all Amateur Radio Operators is AMSAT itself.

I recommend joining AMSAT and helping to contribute to the various initiatives, but even if you don't, then you can find some great info at their
Station and Operating Hints page

QRZ

Many operators hang out on the QRZ Satellite and Space Communications forum

As I told a relative, there are a few dozen hard hard core Sat operators in the USA.
These hams are like 24x7x365 on or about Amateur Radio Satellites.

At least it seems that way :)

The even better news is that most are enthusiastic about helping anyone try to get on the air!

Give a shout out, give it a try!

PSK again

ok, so I hadn't made much progress getting PSK setup.

Finally got my IC-706 working with FLDIGI courtesy of Steve from xggcomm fame.

Win10 Nextbook tablet - mini usb adapters, xggcomm icom / usb cable and voila: PSK31
decoding.

So, the goal is to get familiar using PSK31 on 20meters so that I can move onto my next experiment:

http://www.frontiernet.net/~aflowers/dopplerpsk/dopplerpsk.html
Here also are the latest elements for PSAT:
PSAT
1 90720U          15234.36512451 +.00008395 +00000-0 +21488-3 0 0099
2 90720 054.9897 293.1329 0244566 052.6872 309.6216 15.1526532401420
When PSAT-1 is using the PSAT-1 callsign, that means the digipeater is off. But as of now, PSK31 experimentation is authorized.
28.120MHz PSK31 uplink and 435.350MHz FM downlink.
Bob, WB4aPR