Good pass of Space Station, but only VU2ADV and NA1SS beacon heard!
|There was a near overhead pass of International Space Station in my region today evening. I had kept my Moxon Yagi pointed to the beginning of the pass in the hope of hearing some DX from Arabian Gulf region.
As usual, I kept my IC-2730A dual band VHF/UHF full duplex radio, to the satellite frequency with uplink on VHF at 145.990 MHz and downlink at 437.810 MHz, the starting frequency for Doppler correction. R-TONE, which is the CTCSS tone for uplink, was set at 67 Hz. That audio tone on the uplink is needed to access the cross-band repeater of the Amateur Radio on International Space Station.
Doppler tracking was done manually during the pass, looking at the display on Argentinian Amsat Satellite pass prediction page. This is an animation made from multiple screenshots. The clock face displays the direction with a yellow pointer and elevation with a green bar. Numerical display can be seen above that as azimuth and elevation. Below the clock face instantaneous Doppler correction is seen both for uplink and downlink. This time I did rotate the Moxon Yagi manually three times during the pass to nearly match the direction of the pass. As my Moxon Yagi has few elements and larger beamwidth, that was enough to cover a good part of the pass. But I could hear only VU2ADV calling several times and the NA1SS modulated CW beacon.