Sunrise in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney can be very special. On this day (6th January 2001), we were on site at 5:00am. We were hoping to work 80M DX - there's a short DX window into Europe. However, there was a wind blowing, we weren't able to erect our quarter wave vertical as we intended - it's supported by a helium balloon (actually a 250L garbage bag) with the ocean acting as a counter-poise.
Our objectives were four fold:
Most of the engineering effort for the day was provided by Brett VK2CBD and Andrew VK2AC - I was there to provide charm and grace to the operation.
We had completed setup by 6:30am. Our first target was AO-10. We tuned to 145.809MHz to hear the beacon and were rewarded with a tone from the satellite. The signal was quite low and suffered from deep fades which I'm lead to understand is due to the satellite somersaulting through space. Brett would manually steer the beam to peak the signal which no great hardship since the satellite was 35,000kms and not changing its relative position in the sky.
There was no one else on the band, so we planned to catch RS-12 pass later that morning. Andrew managed to erect a dipole for 10M by tying off to a couple of poles at about 5M elevation.
At 8:30am, the satellite was making its pass, Andrew had tuned up to 145.910Mhz TX and 29.406Mhz RX. We heard his CQ call on the downlink (5/7) but no one else came back. The satellite finished its pass with no QSO but we had the happy feeling that we made the link.
We dropped to the lower part of the band to tune around. We heard Reg - VK2MP - calling CQ. We made the QSO with a 5/5 report - a little scratchy but not too bad.
We then heard Ian - VK1BG - in Canberra and made a very scratchy 5/3 report. Brett suddenly realized that we were vertically polarised - the convention being horizontal. We quickly fixed that and made the call again. Ian nearly fell out of chair - the signal picked up by over 30dB to a full 20 over arm chair copy! Reg came back and confirmed the gain.
To be honest, I was quite astonished that even at that distance (several 100kms), the polarisation made that much difference (clearly I'm used to H.F).
That wrapped up the day. I must admit that it pretty much galvanised me to look more seriously at satellite work. Whilst it's nice to have a computer controlled azel, that morning showed me what can be accomplished without too much sophistication.
Portable VHF Satellite and DX
The mast you see silhouetted against the sky is a base station for the Government Radio Network - a Motorolla Trunked Radio System. Interestingly, the base station is buried underground in a container to make the facility more acceptable to local residents - they obviously haven't seen W5UN's more modest efforts.
To provide the structural support for the 2M and 70cm Yagi beams, Brett had procured a surveyors tripod. This worked out pretty well in fact. Adding a couple of lengths of aluminum tubing to make the mast and cross support, and we were away.
We tuned to 435.10989Mhz for TX and 145.844MHz for RX. We heard VK2APG (Gerry from the South Coast of NSW) calling CQ and with a bit of tuning, we made a good SSB QSO with a 5/2 report. However, the satellite started to fade so we swapped to PSK31 and finished the contact with a perfect copy.
We started our second operation which was terrestrial 2M DX. To check conditions, we tried to open a few DX repeaters around the state. We had no problems opening Orange and Ulladulla, so things looked good.
Shane Magrath
VK2KEP