I didn’t think the transponder had been turned on, but things must have gone well.
Expecting to be able to decode telemetry during a pass predicted to begin at 20:42 EDT here in FN41fn-land, I started hearing QSOs at 20:37 EDT. They continued fast/furious until my local LOS somewhere around 20:44 EDT. The signal was fairly strong for 7 minutes, which is to be expected when using omni antennas (egg beater).
I suspect the current TLEs are a bit off as this showed up at my QTH (FN41) about 7 minutes earlier than expected. It also went LOS about 7 minutes early.
I was surprised to read that AO-85 is utilizing Data Under Voice (DUV) telemetry using 200 bps FSK, inaudible during audio transmissions — hearing voice QSOs I didn’t even bother to check telemetry decodes. It is fantastic to have another FM bird added to the inventory (we were down to one).
