Putting on “old man” voice … “Back in my day, you were lucky to work one station and had only a few minutes maybe three or four times a day to do so”
Things are MUCH easier now, with more than a dozen birds in the sky, you can pretty much fill your day chatting with people. I use a program called Gpredict, which is available for multiple platforms. It has a feature called “Sky at a glance” that is wonderful for keeping track of things coming up.
The image below is a snap of this afternoon’s passes. Each different color represents a different satellite. The time scale is local (EST). The length of each colored bar corresponds to the duration of the pass — short passes may be great for DX, or simply might be marginal passes. You can hover your mouse over each colored bar to get more details.
Thirteen different birds are shown with 19 different roughly 10 minute long opportunities to talk to someone. And that’s just from 1:30 PM to 9:30 PM today!
