Omar & Carlos with Arrow antenna	Omar, Maurice & Carlos with Arrow antenna by the Food Tent	Dave W8AAS holding Arrow with Carlos in back & Omar on right
Carlos, Dave & Omar	Carlos, Dave W8AAS & Ed N2EC during AO-7 pass on Sat. at AOS 6:19 pm - Photo by Jon KF30	Tracking AO-7 - Photo by Jon KF3O
Carlos pointing Arrow antenna with El measuring device on beam	Ed N3QB by the operating table Sunday morning	Ed & Art by the operating table Sunday
Ed N2EC taking a photo of Art who is taking a photo of Ed	Dave W8AJR on site Sunday	The Yaesu FT-847 radio & Alinco Power supply as configured on Sunday
The satellite passes for Sunday	Ed N2EC watching the sat tracking on the laptop	Ed N3QB, Dave W8AJR & Ed N2EC at the operating table
Bill Edgar N3LLR Dir. Atlantic Div. ARRL & Tom Abernethy W3TOM Vice Dir.	Bill Edgar & Tom Abernethy behind the Carasat laptop tracking satellites

Report by Ed N2EC

 This year was a unique operating year. Normally we use our automated system with the following components operating under computer control.

Yaesu FT-847 receiver
Yaesu az-el rotator and control box
Primetec rotator controller
Laptop with tracking software – either N3OY’s JSattrack or Satpc32
Tripod with crank-up 20’ mast

This is a complicated system to set up and operate. We have two key operators who know how to do it. However, in less than two weeks before Field Day we learned that they both would be out of town for at least the Saturday of Field Day. It seemed we would not be able to have a Carasat presence at Field Day. Mark KB3GJE in an email on the Wednesday before Field Day suggested finding someone with an Arrow handheld antenna to work Field Day. At the Cara Business Meeting the next day on Thursday June 21, 2007, Dave W8AJR responded by suggesting we do Field Day with his Arrow antenna and Yaesu FT-847 satellite receiver. The challenge of giving the “old college try” was accepted.  We needed someone with experience working the Arrow. Ed N2EC remembered that Dave W8AAS brought his Arrow antenna  to a Carasat meeting on June 1, 2002, http://www.cabic.com/carasat/June_1_02/pages/101-0177_IMG.htm and so Ed sent out a panic email to Dave to help us out. Dave said yes he could make Saturday.

It has been known that satellites can be worked with an Arrow antenna. Amsat President Rick Hambley‘s 2007 Field Day message on Amsat.org noted that a simple Arrow antenna would work for FM birds.

You may be wondering what you need to make a contact on one of the "easy" FM satellites. The simplest equipment to have would be an HT (either a dual band HT or separate 70cm and 2m HTs) and a small beam antenna like the homebrew antennas described in recent AMSAT Journals or the commercial Arrow antenna.

The Good News is that after much effort, we were finally able to make one contact at 12:10 pm on Sunday with  K4CQ  2A VA (Lynchburg ARC). We received one point for the QSO and a 100 point bonus for making at least one contact. Our total score is 101 points.

Here is how we did it.  First we needed the passes for Field Day. We went to Amsat’s web page  
http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/index.php  and clicked on the top tab “Passes.” You need your longitude, 
latitude and height in meters. From Google Earth  we found the Field Day site at Triadelphia Ridge Elementary School, 13400 Triadelphia Road at the intersection of Folly Quarter and Triadelphia Road in Glenelg, MD. The long and lat are given in degrees, minutes & seconds. We found a web page converter to obtain the decimal values which are latitude 39.264361 and longitude –76.983211. Google Earth gave the height as 640 ft which becomes 195 meters for use in Amsat’s pass program. For the SO-50 pass the Amsat Pass line reads (with the object name and local time added) as follows.  

So this means the pass begins at 12:06 pm for the AOS (acquisition of signal). The azimuth (which is the direction you are pointing  the antenna)  begins at 197 degrees which is just a little west of south. From that initial position we continued to rotate the antenna eastwardly ending up  at 37 degrees east of due north when we had LOS (loss of signal).

The Nova tracking program was continuously reading out the latest az and el values which were being shouted out to the antenna holder. Initially the elevation is 0 degrees as the satellite comes up over the horizon and then increases. The pass chart above shows the maximum elevation was only 51 degrees.

As stated above the contact was made at 12:10 pm when we were about 4 minutes into the pass which was about 1/3 the way through the pass.  At the time Art was working the radio, Joe was watching the Nova tracking program on the computer screen and calling out the continuously changing Az and El values. Ed N2EC was pointing the Arrow antenna and  Maurice had his incline measuring device on the shaft of the Arrow antenna and he read it to give  feedback to Ed as to whether to go higher or lower. We were happy campers at the end of that pass.

The passes for Saturday and Sunday that we tried or that we were going to try are listed in the following Table with further comments below.

 What We Tried
 

When we came Saturday morning to set up the Satellite Station we found that all of the spaces in the main tent were taken. We were operating under the call sign W3AO and we were 19a (a lot of transmitters). We also realized that we needed to have the person holding the Arrow antenna to be able to hear the radio -- as a strong audio signal would indicate that the antenna was being pointed correctly at the moving satellite. Initially we set up in the back end of the Food Tent where there was extra space. However, once we began operating we decided to move the radio out of the tent to a position under a nearby tree (for shade) so as to be closer to where the antenna operator was standing and to reduce the length of the cables between the antenna and the radio. .

Dave W8AJR brought his Yaesu FT-847 satellite receiver, his Alinco power supply & his Arrow  antenna along with some cables.  

Dave W8AAS   brought his Arrow antenna,  his  sat radios  (FT-817nd and TH-D7G) and his Palm which has a PCSat  tracking program. This Palm program allowed the radio operator to try to factor in doppler and to give the az and el values to the antenna operator.

We began Field Day with Dave W8AAS operating the FT-847 radio and Carlos [from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) Radio Club] operating the Arrow antenna for most of the day.

The first pass was the International Space Station (ISS). We listened, but Dave W8AAS said it is unlikely that ISS will be available  because the new astronaut who had just recently arrived on the ISS from the Shuttle would be busy with the many new things he had to do at the ISS. This prediction was correct because we did not hear any traffic from the ISS on this and later  passes.

Other Saturday Birds

AO-27  This is an FM bird. The two passes at 2:47 and 4:26 we heard other stations, but we could not make a QSO.  For an FM bird it is only the strongest station that gets captured by the bird (the FM capture effect) and that will be the only one to make the contact.

AO-7  This bird was launched in November 1974.  It now can only operate when the solar panels are in sunlight.. Also every time it comes back into the sun it powers up -- in either Mode A (10 meter downlink - which we do not have) or Mode B (2 meter downlink -which we do have on the Arrow antenna).  

When it came over at  6:19 pm we did not hear anything and so we assumed it was in Mode A. However, after Field Day we checked a logging site that lists the passes & indicates whether AO-7 was in Mode A or B. The site is  http://www.planetemily.com/ao7/main.php   where you click on “View the Log.”  For that pass at our 6:19 pm AOS the log states that it was in Mode B. As we report in the table above – we did not hear anything.

 AO-51  FM “Echo” This is a recent bird launched in June 2004 and it is popular. Since we could not hear our uplink, we assume that our signal was not strong enough to be “captured” by the bird over the many other stations trying to connect.

 SO-50 FM  “Saudisat” When Ed N2EC went to the Amsat page to see the birds they were recommending for Field Day, this one was not listed. However, thanks to Dave W8AAS finding it and having it in his keps in his Palm sat tracking program, we were able to listen to it at the 9:51 pass. Ed N3QB joined us and pointed the Arrow antenna. We did not make a QSO, but this will be the bird on which we finally make our single contact on Sunday.

Dave W8AAS has a final kudo for our operating on Sunday. Ed N2EC had a laptop with the Nova tracking program, but when he tried to update the keps at Space-Track.org before Field Day the keps were not working. Dave was able to go home early Saturday evening and bring back the keps on a USB memory stick.  They easily downloaded into the laptop and the Nova program. As a result we were able track the birds on Sunday and have the az-els for pointing the Arrow antenna..  

 Sunday Birds

 Sunday morning Dave W8AJR set up his radio and Arrow antenna. We were pleased to see our experienced operator Art arrive to take over the radio operation. Arrow antenna operators were Becky and Ed N2EC.

AO-7  This bird is discussed above.. Again we did not hear anything so we assumed it was in Mode A. Post Field Day the tracking site listed above said that it was in Mode B.  This is hard to explain. When the 11:58 pass came Art suggested that the Arrow antenna would not be sending up a strong uplink and so we decided not to work it.

AO-51  FM See comments above in Saturday. We again could not hear ourselves on this popular bird.

VO-52  “Hamsat” This is a SSB linear transponder that is inverting. The uplinks range from 435.220 to 435.280 and the downlink is from 145.87 to 145.93. Art noted that this inverting transponder is too challenging to work on a radio that is not computer controlled to take in account the doppler. So we did not try to work it. Normally, in our standard computer-controlled system we do use software that controls the radio to take into account the changing doppler as the bird comes overhead.

SO-50 FM  See the early section above where we describe in detail how we worked this bird at the 12:06 pm pass to make the contact. Then for the 1:48 pass we did not try to work the bird because we believed the new Field Day rule meant that if you worked the FM bird and made one QSO, you could not count any further contacts. This implied to us that you should not be making any more contacts so as to let others who did not have a QSO to work the bird. The Rule reads in the Satellite section:  
7.3.7.1 Stations are limited to one (1) completed QSO on any single channel FM satellite.

Lessons Learned

Limitations on Using the Arrow Antenna – it is important to keep the xmtr power within the Arrow's limits (10  watts if you're using the duplexer; otherwise, something low enough  to be safe for whoever is holding the antenna).

It may be possible to bypass the duplexer and connect the 2 meter and 440 antennas on the Arrow directly to these ports on the radio (which is, in fact, what we did). By doing  so, we were able to run about 50W on the uplink. None of our antenna operators complained of “a tingling sensation” so apparently, for the brief times we were transmitting, it was relatively safe. We wouldn’t recommend doing this for long QSOs, however.  

Those at the satellite station who helped out or who stopped by to talk and encourage us on were: