Well Field Day 2015 has come and gone, and I was able to snag another satellite contact to help garner some bonus points for my club (Newport County Radio Club) — Thank you NX9B, I was W1LY on the other end.
Despite multiple attempts in the days prior, I was never able to hear my own downlink on AO-73. I’ve worked dozens of stations on that bird in the past, and had noted some rather large discrepancies in the published relationship between uplink and downlink frequencies, which I had adjusted for manually in the past. But my attempts to calibrated things so this would be factored in automatically were not successful, so AO-73 was off the table for this Field Day. Still, the AO-7 and FO-29 calibration went well.
AO-7 was launched in 1974, worked well until 1981, when the batteries failed in a shorted mode. A decade later, in 2002, one of the failed batteries went open circuit, which has allowed the spacecraft to operate off of solar power. As it passes from being eclipsed by the earth and into sunlight, it can restart in one of two modes, Mode A, or Mode B. Last year, my FD contact was through AO-7 using Mode B. This year, I could not hear AO-7 at all during the first opportunity, so that probably means it started in Mode A — luck of the draw.
FO-29, young by comparison as it was launched in 1996, continues to work fantastically well to this day. The first available pass happened right around 3 PM local time, just about a half hour after the unsuccessful AO-7 pass. Almost immediately, I made a CW contact with NX9B. But as I continued to call CQ hoping to provide a contact for other clubs that might need one, no one else responded, and something went wrong with the 2-Meter transmit path toward the end of the pass.
Well, the good news is that I made the 100 point bonus satellite QSO with NX9B’s help. The bad news is I am off the air until I figure out what went wrong. And the AO-73 calibration issue remains a mystery to be solved later.
Update June 30: Bench testing of the IC-9100 ruled out any issue with the radio, so the defect was in the antenna, and the suspicion is that the Gamma Match has failed. But that’s a $25 problem. Whew!
