Receiving Space Station with CP22E VHF Antenna Below My Roof Top!

All veteran Low Earth Orbit Amateur Radio Satellite operators know that the best setup is a directional Yagi antenna with azimuth-elevation rotator and a full duplex radio with automatic Doppler correction. But there are many operators in this region who do not have this full setup and do not attempt LEO satellite operations, inspite of having dual band VHF/UHF radios and CP22E VHF antenna which is quite popular. Agreed CP22E antenna is meant for VHF only and is omnidirectional. But only a few are aware that it will receive fairly well on UHF amateur radio band which is roughly third harmonic of the VHF band.

Today while I was listening to Amateur Radio on International Space Station using my CP22E VHF antenna, at the time of closest approach, I could see that the UHF downlink signal strength was very strong, with 6-7 segments on the signal meter. Of couse, it was a pass with 78 degrees maximum elevation in this region. With this same antenna, I get hardly one segment for a VHF repeater about 40km from here. That is because my CP22E antenna is currently mounted well below the level of the top of my sloping roof and kept adjacent to the roof on the opposite side. But for a satellite in the sky, my roof top is not a hinderance during most of its pass! Part of the roof which you are seeing in the video clip is the lower most part of the tiled sloping roof. Antenna is on a 3m long one inch CPVC hot water pipe, with grounding of the base of the antenna using 10 sq mm insulated copper wire down to a 4 feet copper clad Earth rod driven down in my garden.

You can hear plenty of stations quite loud in this audio clip which I recorded using CP22E VHF antenna, which was on my first floor terrace, quite close to the first floor sloping roof as you have seen in the video clip.

I am posting this to encourage my friends who hesitate to start LEO satellite operations just because they do not have a good antenna or radio. I started off last year with this CP22E antenna and later moved on to Moxon Yagi when I could homebrew it. I still do not have an antenna rotator. Yet I have been able to work most of the good passes of LEO FM satellites. After all Amateur Radio is about experimentation and innovation and not just for using time tested methods only and not operating if you do not have the full setup. Now what are you waiting for?