UNCUT AO-91 demo (impromptu Christmas Eve demo)

UPDATE: I am happy to report Blair made his first FM satellite QSO over AO-91 on January 7th with Paul, N8HM, using the Arrow antenna he already had and a Kenwood TH-D7. Let's hope he makes many more. :-)

This is an uncut and lightly edited video I made mostly so Blair (the ham who saw and joined me at the 8 minute mark) could see it. I normally only upload highly edited videos (24, 32 or more hours of editing). Even though it doesn't meet my normal standards I figured others besides Blair might still be interested.

2017-12-24 1753 UTC

03:05 Bird comes in strong
04:58 YV6CR FJ78 Contacted? he said WP3KG
07:42 KG3GDS FN00 CONTACTED
08:00 Blair arrives - demo begins
09:02 KE4AL EM761 CONTACTED
09:16 WO3T FN00 CONTACTED
09:29 K3RRR CONTACTED
10:22 ???MTS FN32 Contacted? What was prefix?
13:00 KC3GFZ FN00 CONTACTED
13:13 WN9Q EN64 CONTACTED

This is from the Christmas Eve AO-91 pass at 1753 UTC (2017-12-24). I was just having a little fun for myself before I left Raleigh for Wilmington to be with my parents for Christmas. About halfway through the pass, Blair, another ham, saw me from his car in this shopping lot and came over, so I did I did a little demo for him.

I was lucky because I recently made a cable for my Kenwood TM-V71 to pull the audio off the DATA pin. This cable allowed me to get audio into my recorder and play audio from the radio's speaker simultaneously. Normally I plug a cable into the speaker out port but that disables the internal speaker.

I made the cable originally so I could decode the Data Under Voice (DUV) telemetry from AO-91 during commissioning, which helps the engineers determine if the bird is okay. You need the unfiltered audio because the data is all below 200 hz, which is normally filtered from speaker out.

Unfortunately, even using the supposedly unfiltered audio from the DATA pin I still couldn't get the FoxTelem software to decode anything. But without this cable if I wanted someone else to hear the audio I would have to hook up a splitter in front of the recorder and run a second cable to an external speaker. I couldn't have done that in time for Blair to hear, or it would have been a lot of effort for not a lot of gain because the pass might have been over before I got it all hooked up.

I also have another proper AO-91 video I'm making. It is from the second daytime pass right after it was commissioned about a month ago (on the US Thanksgiving holiday).

To those that celebrate it, Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays to everyone else!

73, John Brier KG4AKV

P.S. I think my phone's tracking app was set for a location I was at the previous day about 40 minutes from where I live, so it was off slightly as far as timing and max elevation. The pass was actually about 72 degrees max elevation, not 67 or whatever I told Blair, and when I thought the bird was at 2 degrees during the last contact, it was actually about 4 or 5 degrees elevation.

Видео UNCUT AO-91 demo (impromptu Christmas Eve demo) канала Space Comms