When: March 11th, 18:30 EST
Where: In-person & Zoom
Duration: ~75 minutes

Please RSVP to the Satellite Presentation at mara.ks1r@gmail.com by March 9th.

We ask that an in-person group be held as there are only 100 slots for the Zoom link. You may join us in person at the Red Cross Center in Topsham or at your own club site. If using your own club site, please make sure to have access to Zoom, TV, and webcam. The Zoom link will be sent out via email before the event.

Misc Additional Information

Working the “easy” satellites with just a handheld radio IS, indeed, an exciting aspect of this magnificent hobby!

My presentation just covers the basics … but afterwards, your members will be able to work the International Space Station’s crossband repeater, and a couple other FM voice satellites.

Clint Bradford, K6LCS AMSAT Ambassador ARRL instructor, Affiliated Club Coordinator, Legacy Circle member 5085 Trail Canyon Drive, Jurupa Valley CA 91752 951-533-4984 - cell https://www.work-sat.com

• SESSION TITLE: How to Work Amateur Satellites with Your Handheld Radio

Seminar description: You do not need 100W of transmit power nor expensive antenna arrays to work the FM voice amateur satellites! Many hams already have the necessary equipment to “work the birds.” This presentation will walk you through ALL the steps needed to successfully work several ham satellites - including the International Space Station.

• AUDIO/VISUAL REQUIREMENTS

Zoom is working well for this presentation.

Please update your copy of Zoom from within the program, which is the “safest” way to upgrade.

My Zoom account will accommodate 100 participants. If you feel we may need a larger capacity, please let me know.

• HOW WILL THIS SESSION BENEFIT YOUR CLUB?

This presentation has been well-received. Between the material presented, the always-lively Q&A during and afterward, the work-sat.com support Web site, and access to me after the fact (via email or phone at 909-999-SATS) with satellite inquiries - you will be providing attendees COMPLETE information on this aspect of the amateur radio hobby.

• SPEAKER BIO

Clint K6LCS has been a ham since 1994, and found his niche in the hobby: working amateur satellites with minimal equipment and telling ALL about it! He has served a liaison between NASA, the ARISS team, and schools coordinating amateur radio contacts between the International Space Station and students (and also orchestrated a wildly successful ARISS contact). Audiences have never found his presentation slides “wordy” nor dull. Trivia questions are included throughout the session - audiences are never bored.

For reference materials, Clint has created a support Web site at work-sat.com .The Web site has become a one-stop source for ALL the citations and equipment recommendations and software suggestions made in the presentation.

Professionally, Clint was sales manager for ADI / Premier Communications / Pryme, worked for a Motorola commercial two-way dealer a couple of years, and for Ham Radio Outlet a couple more. He resides in Jurupa Valley, California, with his wife, Karen, and their new addition to the family: Huck, a two-year-old 75-pound Lab.

• ADVERTISING

I will provide my Web site visitors a link to your club’s Web site on my work-sat.com
Web site. The meeting will also be promoted with announcements on the AMSAT-BB mail list service.

Clint Bradford, K6LCS

https://www.work-sat.com/index.html

MARA had good weather for the practice field day event on April 14th at the Brunswick American Legion. Many members were in attendance, a good time was had by most. :)

MARA members at the practice field day event.

Robert W1TON is tuning in the world with is IC-706.

Donnie WD1F and Simon N1URA working the world on FT8.

Bruce W1ZE, Mike N1MA, and Tom WA1PJS.

Many weeks ago Bill NG1P helped me get setup with a Ubiquiti PowerBeam M5 400 5GHz dish / transceiver. The weather hasn’t been the greatest so its been sitting around a bit. Finally on Sunday April 26th I had the time and the weather was good enough.

Install required a trip up the 130’ tower here at the QTH. The dish is small and light so pretty easy to clamp to the side of the tower. I already had a shielded, weather resistant Ethernet cable up the tower from a previous WiFi link I was no longer using. I did the install and pointed it in the general direction of Oak Hill in Brunswick.

I connected the other end of the Ethernet cable into the power injector and then directly to my laptop where I was very happy to receive an IP address automatically. To save confusion I disabled my WiFi so I was only connected to the dish. After checking the IP and gateway I received it seemed logical I needed to type in the gateway IP of 10.147.130.153 into my web browser. I then could see the AREDN Node status screen.

One point of note with this picture is that at first I had no signal at all. This picture was taken later.

Next step was to message NG1P for instructions on lining up the dish. He said to click the charts button and to watch that data while moving the dish. Because I had to be on the tower I got help from Louise KB1IEF. She could watch the signal strength while I moved the dish around. That screen looks like this.

In no time at all we had found the sweet spot, which is just enough for reasonable performance. We landed in at about a 15dB SNR which is exactly said what Bill said we should look for as a minimum.

Next I hit the ham shack and did some looking around at the mesh network. Seems there are mesh nodes all around New England including MA, NH, CT. I believe the first image shown in this post shows 55 nodes. Here is a piece of the list for your viewing pleasure.

While using my computer with both the WiFi and mesh networks connected I noticed the mesh network had a lower metric. This means it will prefer to route all my traffic over the mesh network. This is understandable because the mesh network is connected via my hard wired Ethernet jack which is normally a better connection then WiFi. In this case I wanted my traffic by default over the WiFi card and only things specifically for the mesh network to go through it. Easy fix. My network configuration utility for Network Manager on Linux has a checkbox for that.

I seem to be getting about 2Mb throughput. While that is a low number in the days if GB internet speeds its a big number for basic graphics, texts, emails, etc. Next I plan to connect this mesh network to the server in the radio rack. From there I can allow people on the mesh to see the KS1R D-Star dashboard, the KS1R web site, connect through our packet node, and just for fun I’ll connect a web camera that updates upon refreshing the page. I’ll keep the bandwith requirements of the services offered at the node here low so they refresh quickly and don’t load down the mesh network as a whole.

I also have been told there are many upgrades planned. One that should improve my connection by about 3db. That should speed things up a bit.

I have lots more to learn and some services to setup. I hope to produce another blog post / article once I learn more and time allows. Stay tuned. :)

DStar KS1R Dash
DStar Reflector 39C

Duplexer Repair

If you didn’t read the last post about repairing the Duplexers for the DStar repeater and would like to you can find it here:
Duplexer Repair

Well it seems the repair was a pretty big success, at least so far. Here is a recent heard list from the repeater. It shows stations that have worked the repeater locally using RF.

Initial Testing

The initial testing was a very quick road test down toward Popham Beach state park. All went well but this was a long way from a thorough test. In the following days as I did whatever it is I do when I do what I do, I kept testing. A trip to my son’s house went well. I could hear the repeater and can get into it. That is an improvement. Then came a trip to Portland for work. Another success. I’m not saying you can work the repeater easily all the way to my office in Portland but in most places its usable. For me the hardest part seemed to be hearing the repeater. If I could hear it, I was into it.

Soon Louise KB1IEF and myself did a walk on Popham Beach. I brought along my handheld but forgot to charge it. The battery was showing low. Past experience tells me I need to run high power so that is what I do. While walking I get a call from Cory KU1U. After the first transmission my battery is showing critical so I drop the power down to 1 Watt. Cory reports no change in signal. This is another really good sign.

KU1U The Promoter

Cory KU1U was excited about the apparent success and started contacting people he knew had DStar to do some testing. Soon there are several others on the repeater trying from all over the place with better then expected success.

A few more

I had an old IC-91AD and dropped it off with Bruce W1ZE. He was on the air in no time. Next was N1MA Mike. Seems he has the IC-705 but hadn’t used it on DStar yet. In no time at all he had it programmed and on the air.

Reflector 39 Charlie

Reflector 39 Charlie has been set as the Maine Statewide D-Star reflector. I tend to keep our repeater connected to it. The reflector serves as a way to do Internet linking of repeaters. Another way in, is using a DStar access point or hotspot. With an AP or hotspot you can either connect directly to our repeater or more common is to connect to the reflector. We have had many others including Terry KA8SCP, Andrew N1MRE, W1DLO, and some from the Caribou DStar repeater joining in.

KU1U from Old Orchard Beach

Probably the best report we have had so far is when Cory KU1U was working the repeater from a handheld radio while walking on Old Orchard Beach. In the world of digital communications you are either in or not. In this case Cory was in.

Audio clip of KU1U from OOB.

Summary

All this recent activity has me using our KS1R DStar repeater more then any others. Soon there will be another DStar radio on Streaked Mountain that is expected to have a very large RF footprint. DStar in general is an easy mode as there isn’t much radio programming that needs to be done beyond your call and the repeater you want to work. I hope to see even more traffic on our D-Star system in the coming days.

More information about all the Clubs repeaters can be found here: KS1R Repeaters

When I first heard of Joe’s W1SK plan to put D-Star on Streaked Mtn I was pretty excited to help. I happened to be going to the Deerfield, NH hamfest so while there I found these gems. Joe then purchased them for his project.



I told Joe I could get them tuned in for him. I can’t say I felt 100% confident due to my lack of experience but was pretty sure I could get the job done. Once the frequencies were finalized I started tuning. One of the 4 cavities I had a real hard time with. I would tune and tighten the lock nut only to have the tuning off again. I could tap the side of the can with a screw driver and the tuning would be all over the place. After fighting this battle for a long time I gave up and took the duplexer apart to see what was going on inside.

I found that the internal parts were covered with oxidation so I cleaned them up and re-assembled. After this process tuning went perfectly. I had this feeling I needed to take the rest of them apart but chose not to. I didn’t have enough rivets, the other cavities were tuning just fine so I called it good enough. This was a mistake.

Disaster

So the duplexers made the trip to Streaked Mtn where they performed very badly. The duplexers being the problem wasn’t immediately known so it caused lots of frustration and speculation. It also cost time and money. Eventually the equipment had to be removed for troubleshooting.

Cory KU1U delivered them to Randy K1XI who is a pro. He determined the duplexers, one cavity in particular, was bad. Once I got this word I felt responsible. I had a brand new TX/RX duplexers that had just arrived here for the KS1R D-Star repeater and I insisted they take them in exchange. The new duplexers were delivered to K1XI for a professional tuning, which was successful, and they are waiting to be put into service.

Another Repair Attempt

I asked for the duplexers back so I could try and repair them a second time. I also asked if the duplexer that was indicated as bad was the one I had attempted to repair but nobody knew that. My repair had gone very smooth and it was tough to tell. Once I had them in my hands I found that the one marked bad was NOT the one I had been inside and cleaned. This was good news and seemed to me to indicate I could clean the rest and have a working set of duplexers. Time to try.

It seems important that the connection between the copper plunger and the little copper fingers be as perfect as possible.



Here is a before and after picture showing just how much I was able to clean these things up.


Now you want to talk about a pain in the $%^@&)@. Getting the bottoms off of a couple of these made me think I was not going to be successful. It required a lot of pounding and prying, drilling, etc. I even had to wait for KB1IEF the XYL to get home to help.

Success ??

They have now been reassembled, tuned, and installed. They seem to be working fine. Tuning went very quick and easy. I believe this to be a very good sign but I’m not calling success until more testing has been done and some time has passed. After putting them into service on our KS1R D-Star repeater I did a quick road trip and all went well.

Closing Thoughts

When dealing with a repeater, especially one that will be in a difficult to reach location, it has to be perfect. The price of less then perfect in anxiety, time, money, etc is just too high. I am happy with how this repair went but not sure I would want to see these duplexers headed for a difficult to reach repeater site. I would want someone in the business, like K1XI to have a look first.

Post hamfest QCWA meeting at Happy China Buffet in Bangor.