Listening IO-86 Amateur Radio Satellite

Today morning there was a pass of LAPAN A-2 (IO-86) amateur radio satellite, starting at 5.27 am IST (UTC+5.30). It was a pass with 32 degrees maximum elevation in my region. But the activation of the voice transponder as per schedule published on their Twitter page was beyond the Time of Closest Approach in my region, at 5.35 am. So I kept my fixed elevation azimuth Moxon Yagi pointed a bit beyond the azimuth of maximum elevation in this region. At about 5.35 am, I started hearing signals from IO-86, about 5 kHz below the nominal frequency as the satellite was beyond the point of TCA.

Nominal uplink is 145.880 MHz with 88.5 Hz CTCSS tone and downlink on 435.880 MHz. I was tuning Doppler manually in my IC 2730 full duplex radio, using the display on Argentinian Amsat pass prediction webpage. Signals were not as strong as on a previous pass in which activation of voice transponder corresponded to the TCA. Still I could hear a couple of Indonesian stations having contacts, though my calls presumably did not reach them, possibly because of my limited setup.

Here is the curated recording of the pass, after removing most of the hissing noise of the open squelch in the radio.

Though I could hear two more stations, I could not make out the callsigns in full due to the low signal strength.