I’ve left my rig on during the daylight hours to automatically collect telemetry packets, and have now received over 1100 of them. And at night, I’ve had successful contacts with a half dozen people.
The biggest challenge continues to be tuners/swishers who fill the passband with “hello” or “dit-dit-dit…” trying to find their own signal on the downlink. At this point many users have confirmed the observation that the uplink has to be shifted higher (up/+) by 8 to 12 KHz from the published UL/DL relationship. Given that the entire passband is only 20KHz that’a a big shift and explains why folks don’t hear themselves. The next challenge is that the orbital parameters are off enough that the uncorrected Doppler shift is approaching 4 KHz. Recent reports have indicated that the object thought to be AO-73 is, in fact, a different Cubesat, and that AO-73 is actually one of two possible other objects. The final determination of which is which will take time.
Personally I decode very few telemetry packets at night when the beacon is dialed down to 30 mW — the beacon is just at the noise level for my antennas (omni directional antennas with about 4.7 dB of cable loss). But I am still decoding 60 to 80 packets a pass during the daytime when the beacon is running 300 mW. Those extra 10 dB make a lot of difference.
