Happy to be heard at 3750 km on LAPAN-A2 (IO-86) amateur radio satellite!

What you heard just now was the recording from IO-86 (LAPAN-A2) pass today morning. It was a pass of about 35 degree maximum elevation in my region. Being a National Holiday in Indonesia, there was activation of the satellite at about 7.52 am in my region, which was two minutes past the time of closest approach (TCA).

I had pointed my fixed elevation/azimuth Moxon Yagi in South East direction to match the location of the satellite at that time. I could hear a few faint voices from the satellite and tried a few calls. Though I could not hear any replies, I was happy to see the post on X by YG4SLJ with audio recording of my signals from Indonesia, at about 3750 km! That is the longest ever for me on Low Earth Orbit satellites.

This is the Doppler tracking from Argentinian Amsat satellite pass prediction page, which I use to tune Doppler manually in my IC-2730A radio. Clock face shows the direction in yellow and elevation in green, during the pass. Display above shows the numerical values. Display below shows the instantaneous Doppler correction.

I had set the radio to the initial frequency shown on the website prior to the pass. CTCSS (R-TONE) for uplink was changed to 88.5 Hz needed for IO-86. I usually keep the default tone as 67 Hz which is needed for most satellites including space station. During the satellite pass, I change frequency of downlink on UHF, in multiples of 5 kHz when the frequency on Argentinian Amsat page is 2.5 kHz away from the frequency which I have set. That is because the minimum step in my radio is only 5 kHz. Often I do not change the uplink frequency in VHF, which has lower magnitude of change.