Barry:
No ping jockey live chat that I know of. There are several email lists &
forums. See AF5CC's suggestion - www.amsat.org. Also the AMSAT-UK folks
at amsat-uk.org. There are links on both sites to current satellite status
(best is the live status page at http://oscar.dcarr.org/, also the page at
http://www.dk3wn.info/p/?page_id=29535 ). Also links to live tracking &
predictions (good sites are at amsat.org, http://www.n2yo.com/, and
heavens-above; be aware some sites use UTC, others local time! Your
6-digit grid square or nearest major city is sufficient for predicting AOS,
LOS, and where to aim antennas.
Good emails lists are the amsat-bb forum (amsat.org), there are active
forum discussions as well on work-sat.com, several FunCube-related at
amsat-uk, as well as the qrz.com and eham forums and several yahoo groups.
Contact Amsat for information on local groups, hamfest demos, area
coordinators, and local elmering.
All the current satellites are in low earth orbit. The newest ones are all
cubesats (4" cubes) with limited power & antennas. For example, AO73
(Funcube-1) has a 300mW downlink. The only current FM satellite is
SO-50, which is a bit harder to copy than AO-27 or AO-51. Fox-1 (AMSAT-NA,
FM cubesat) is scheduled for launch in December, and I understand several
cubesats with ham transponders were deployed from the ISS on Friday. There
are a lot of cubesats in the pipeline, many are using 2M & 70cm frequencies
(legal, if IMO questionable, under some interpretations of the amateur
satellite service rules), and several have FM or linear transponders that
will be of interest to us hams.
If you have some rover-size 2M & 70cm antennas, you can elevate them 10-15
deg and they should do reasonably well for you. You don't need huge
amounts of gain - I get very good results with a 4 element 2M and the
bottom half of my old AO10/13/40 70cm circular polarized antenna on an
az/el mount. At a demo at a local hamfest last weekend, N8HM made a bunch
of contacts with a pair of FT817s and a handheld Elk 2-band antenna. From
your QTH on the NC coast, you may get opportunities to work Europe on AO-7
and FO-29.
Good luck & 73
Steve KS1G
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Steve Greene ks1g04@gmail.com <kay ess one gee zero four>@gmail.com
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