My initial thoughts on how to work Amateur Radio Satellites

My initial thoughts on how to work Amateur Radio Satellites

I have been toying the idea of working Amateur Radio Satellites ever since I got my callsign way back in 1985. So far I have not been able to do so. When I was active on VHF, once or twice I could listen to Amateur Radio Satellite signals and it sounded like RTTY on HF bands as I do not have the equipment to decode the signals.

I have been inactive on the band for quite some time and is now wishing to come back. My wish to work Amateur Radio Satellites have also come back to me and I have started researching on it. As the first step I have followed the Twitter Handles of International Space Station, Amateur Radio on the ISS and AMSAT. I remember viewing ISS in sky as a moving tiny ‘star’ above my home long back when I could time the pass from a news item in the local daily.

Today I could contact the Amateur Radio on the ISS Twitter Handle on this aspect and they promptly replied, giving me a link to find the pass times of Amateur Radio Satellites. It is a link from the AMSAT website. You have to choose the satellite from the big list, of which ISS is given as the first one.

After that you have to enter the Decimal Latitude and Longitude of your location, which you can easily find by a Google search. Elevation in meters has also to be submitted, the default being Zero. Since I am staying only slightly above sea level, I did not have to bother about that. On clicking the Predict button, it showed me three passes for each day, for the three days from today. I know that this is just a very preliminary step for working Amateur Radio Satellites. Shall follow it up further and keep posting.