Sparks's Journal

FO-29 Success

Yesterday I had a broken QSO with K9?H?. We were running CW and between the fading, the Doppler shift, and my poor CW skills I couldn't quite get the full callsign and exchange. And then, of course, I was also chasing myself all over the transponder. This morning was completely different, however.

The pass of FO-29 was going to be high. Being that I'm still working on my antennas and not knowing what to expect I was just hoping to hear myself. Tuning around the center of the transponder I clearly heard N8HM calling CQ. I was able to find myself on the transponder and tune myself onto Paul's frequency. To my surprise he heard me and we were able to have a somewhat broken QSO. I'm not hearing the downlink that strongly (clearly an antenna issue) but we were able to swap grid squares and have a short QSO. Turns out Paul is just up the road in DC making this perhaps the closest distance satellite contact I've had.

I need to go back through my logs but I think this may be my first FO-29 QSO. It is, at least, my first FO-29 QSO in many years.

Sparks's Journal

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First attempts at FO-29