I have been working on the Galaxis Space Scanner Tracking System

Click Here to See What I have found out

This picture was taken from my Driveway on 10/25/03 about 9:00 PM local time looking north towards the mountains. About a hour after this picture was taken we lost power for the rest of the night and into most of Sunday. Needless to say it made for a night with no sleep and a very hectic few days. Just before they were going to evacuate us the wind came up from the East and moved the fire West of us. Unfortunately this is where it burned all of those houses in the Clairmont area, so our good fortune was our neighbors misfortune.

The morning of the day this picture was taken I worked Mike on the space station for the first time. I heard him coming over the horizon saying he was coming up on Los Angeles and it looked like a smoggy day. Then he said "wait a minute while I get my camera I need to get a picture of this". He saw the giant plume from the fires and was amazed, I then called and told him I was at the base of that plume. So all and all it made for a very interesting evening.

This is about the same shot taken a month later

Well AO40 Appears Is Dead So Just use This For Reference.

I am using a 12' TVRO dish with a Down East Microwave 2400 to 144 converter mounted at the antenna and then a 144 to 28 converter in the shack to use my FT990 as the receiver. I have added an Icom IC 910H to the station and changed the dish feed to a tri-band patch designed by Robert W0LMD. With the new patch I now hear about 1.5 S units of noise floor on the Bird when the squint is about 7 degrees. I can't expect to get much better receive than this.

My FT100D has been returned to the vehicle for regular mobile use. I use the FT990 to copy the beacon and I have also added an Icom PCR-1000 receiver that I use for band scanning.

12/21/02 I replaced the DEM downconverter with an AIDC 3731AA from Bob K5GNA@aol.com. I find this converter to be far superior to the DEM unit in both sensitivity and selectivity. With the old converter I got minor desense on U and Major on L band. Since changing the converter I can find no desense at all. It also has a much higher gain so I can pad the signal down in the shack to get the noise level where I want it. By padding at the station end I also reduce the feed through from 2 meters. All and all I find this unit an excellent investment and strongly recommend it.

For everything you always wanted to know about big dishes and AO40 visit Robert W0LMD's web site http://www.ultimatecharger.com/dish.html

Here is an Interesting Spectrum taken Jan 25 2003 during the QSO Party. The middle beacon is at the vertical blue line. The narrow pulse at about 29.290 is a pulse from a frequency hopping phone. This is probably the most activity I have seen on the bird. There appear to be at least 10 distinct QSO's.

During the QSO Party I worked Othmar OE1SOW (My first Austria). He then sent me a picture of him working me. This just goes to show that with a little bit of imagination it doesn't take a lot to work the bird. This is a new definition of "Arm Strong" rotor. Thanks for the QSO and picture Othmar.