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NG0R First QSO via Satellite

I spent some time in EN24 yesterday with some folks from the W0CRC (Crow River Radio Club).  Chris KC0YBM was putting on a demo showing folks how to work satellites to make some QSOs. He has a nice portable setup where he can operate from the back of his Subaru with an FT-8800R and an Arrow antenna.

I spent the afternoon shooting video and stills to put together a future presentation for a couple of the local clubs. As part of that activity I concluded that I should be able to make a couple of quick changes to my shack that would allow my me do the same thing from home.

So today (Sunday) in between the normal chores I managed to put a couple of new QSOs in my log.


It looks like I have a DST error in the log... should be 23:xx.. fixed.

AJ5C was my first QSO via satellite. K8YSE was my second. Both of the Q's were completed on the AO-51 satellite.

Here is a quick picture of my temporary shack from my camera phone.

I am running Linux with the program GPredict to figure out when the satellites will pass my area. I am running CQRLog as my standard logging program.  Nothing too fancy here, it is your basic HF+VHF/UHF/Microwave+QRP shack. (My Elecraft K2 is not in the picture as I am doing some work on it over at the work bench)

I used a FT-1900 (2m FM) as the uplink radio connected to my 144mhz SSB/CW weak signal antenna. I used a FT-7800 (deaf on 2m but 70cm FM works fine) as the downlink radio connected to my 432mhz SSB/CW weak signal antenna. Both beams are on my VHF tower. The antennas are not really tuned for this high in the band but they seemed to play ok.



Since AO-51 is a FM bird you dial in the uplink frequncy 145.920mhz and just leave it alone. I then dialed in the downlink frequency of 435.300mhz. I then swung the antennas to the southwest and waited.  AO-51 rose in the southwest and then made an arc to my northwest and was pretty easy to follow. I had some slight doppler shift on the downlink so I ended up tuning in at 435.305mhz.

QSO with AJ5C

QSO with K8YSE

The QSOs can be pretty short as there are a lot of folks trying to work people in a very short window. Typically it is callsigns + grids + roger/73. There are is some occasional chit-chit if there is time and it is not too crowded.

Sure, a nice dual-band/two-band-at-a-time rig like an FT-8800R would make this easier. This took about an hour to setup to make my first QSOs via satellite and cost nothing.

I will likely get a satellite friendly radio and an arrow antenna for portable operation while on photo trips, camping, and family outings. This was pretty fun. At some point I would like to try to work some of the linear transponders on SSB and CW.  --That is an adventure for another day.

73 de NG0R

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Did you vote today?

A few quick images from my polling location this morning around 7:20am.....




The city of Kingston has two booths... on the other side of the room the township of Kingston has quite a few more.





The optical reader is pretty neat. It counts the votes in real time and they have a paper copy of the ballot in case they need to do a recount.  (Belt and suspenders approach)



The city of Kingston has just over 100 people pre-registered to vote. (I am not sure how many the township has... but I suspect that it is quite a few more based upon the number of booths that they have.)







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What happened to Olive Garden?



"Back in the day" the portions at Olive Garden were awesome. It was common to have a "take home box" with the left over portions.

It has been a while since we have been into an Olive Garden. We stopped frequenting them (multiple locations) after repeated issues with extremely long waits to get a table during family outings. Last night Ben decided that he wanted to go there for to celebrate his birthday. We were running errands in St Cloud so we stopped in at the nearby Olive Garden location. There was no line at the door which was a nice change. The meal was nice... but extremely small. 

What the heck happened to the Tour of Italy meal?  That used to have have three decent sized sections of the meal and ALWAYS guaranteed some left-overs for lunch the next day. It is tiny now.  For a $17 plate I have MUCH higher expectations.  --This was lots of sauce... very little food

Clearly Olive Garden is NOT the deal that they used to be. I think that I will vote with my wallet and take my business else where.  --It was nice knowing you Mr & Mrs Olive Garden.