Overview The Skunkworks team at the Gloucester County Amateur Radio Club is always looking for new projects to dig into, learn from, and build something new. So when we found that the “Greencube” satellite had been launched and was a very different type of device we started figuring out how we could work it. The […]
“Success” for the GCARC Field Day satellite station has always had somewhat of a low bar – if we made the one contact needed for the 100 bonus points we declared success and quit, finding that getting any additional satellite contacts weren’t worth the effort. Normally satellite bands are pretty open with only about a […]
For those unfamiliar with satellite operation, working DX is quite different from terrestrial radio. Band conditions don’t really matter since the stations that can be worked all must be within the footprint of the satellite. The satellite footprint is determined by the altitude of the satellite above the earth. It’s like shining a flashlight on […]
The clubhouse satellite station has had steady incremental upgrades over the past few years but one factor had remained constant – the antenna and rotator system. The antennas were 1980’s style Cushcraft units that were probably average at the time and gave reasonable but not outstanding performance. Since “outstanding” is a goal of the […]
With the plethora of new rocket technology these days it seems that someone is launching interesting new satellites every couple of days. Many of these are “microsats” the size of a Rubik’s cube and can be popped off of the top of a rocket or shot out of a slot on the International Space Station […]
The GCARC 2018 Field Day Satellite Station Field Day brings out the creativity in hams since we have to adapt our typical operating configurations and practices to a completely different setting. This was also true for the satellite team (K2QA, K2ZA, N3PUU, KD2RPE and WB2MNF) as we prepared for the 2018 event. Under Field Day […]
Tonight on the Thursday night GCARC net there was some discussion about digipeating your signal thru the ISS and NO-84 satellite. This is detailed in the December 2018 issue of QST so I won’t repeat those details, but here’s a quick write-up of that process and how I made it work. Both NO-84 and the […]
Astronauts on the International Space Stations have recently been having conversations with school students and one QSO was captured by our station on November 13. In this recording astronaut Serena Aunon-Chancellor answers questions from school students about the experience of being in space. We can only hear one side of the conversation (hence the periods of […]
In preparation for a presentation at the GCARC 2018 Hamfest, here’s a description of the current configuration of the W2MMD satellite station. Hopefully these diagrams will be useful in understanding how everything fits together and is used. Voice Communication Here’s how the voice communication process works. The SDR Console program runs on the PC and […]
An important aspect of remote control is the ability to point the antennas in the desired direction. Fortunately the PST Rotator program has client/server capability that will let you run a remote copy of the program that will control the rotator at the W2MMD QTH. The Server program is set to run automatically at W2MMD, […]
