So the day before yesterday, I was determined to make a contact via ARISSat-1. I had MacDoppler fired up and tuning my rig during a late night pass. There was a great daylight pass in the early morning hours. Sunrise and the alarm came at about the same time, and I dashed downstairs so I could get everything warmed up and ready to go.
Radio — check
RF — check
Macbook — check
MacDoppler — uncheck — what?
MacDoppler decided to die on me. I couldn’t get the “Enable Radio” check box to work. I was greeted with a spinning beach ball for about 6 seconds, then a “thunk” noise.
By the time I went through about a dozen different attempts to get things going, I had completely missed the pass. And as it turned out, that was the last daylight time pass for about 10 days. Sigh.
To add insult to injury, today the same thing happened with FO29. MacDoppler refused to tune the radio. As I mentioned before I had restored it to operating condition earely this morning. And I had been using it for four days over the weekend with no issue — enough that I decided to register my copy.
Several emails from support later and I had a general consensus of “it works for others but not you”. But I got it working by a strange combination of power cycling and cable pulling. The last linear transponder bird for the day was VO52. I heard myself on the downlink calling CQ, but nobody was working the bird. Sigh.
During a low-power pass of ARISSat-1 I had no trouble hearing my CW signal. In fact the bird was quite active — a lot of CQing, but no QSOs as the 40 second on / 160 second off low-power mode makes for a choppy existence.
There are so few linear transponder birds left. FO29 is on again/off again as there are power issues and it shuts down in the dark. VO52 is there and workable if people would use it. And ARISSat is fantastic if it was just in high power mode all the time.
AMSAT needs some new linear birds up about 600 km. I think the last several attempts have proven that the big huge P3D birds just are more than hams can pay for and launch. The LEO FM birds are a nightmare as it is one signal at a time.
