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--></style></head><body lang="EN-US" link="blue" vlink="purple"><div class="WordSection1"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d">APRS activists:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d">I forgot to post here on APRSSIG the exciting success of the new APRS satellite, PSAT including its PSK31 Transponder allowing both APRS digipeating and PSK-31 multi-user communications. Launched on 20 May. See <a href="http://aprs.org/psat.html">http://aprs.org/psat.html</a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d">What we need is more IGates bringing the downlink into the APRS-IS. So, if you have a spare radio and can run another IGate instance, we invite you to tune it to 145.825. The satellite signal is weak with only 350 mW, but when it is over your station, it is 10 dB stronger than on the horizon. A good OSCAR class station has no problems…</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d">I don’t expect anyone to wear out their rotators tracking PSAT, no, just a simple vertical over a ground plane will do. Either a 19” vertical whip over a large 6 foot square ground plane or even better, a 58” vertical monopole over the ground plane. This ¾ wavelength vertical has almost 7 dBi gain and will pick up signals during the few minutes overhead. If we have enough of these simple omni monitoring stations/igates then the fact that they only receive near overhead is made up for by the larger number of such simple stations.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d">The larger ground plane (as large as possible) gets closer to the theoretical 3 dB gain of a reflector.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d">Bob, WB4aPR</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1f497d"> </span></p><div><div style="border:none;border-top:solid #b5c4df 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in"><p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"">From:</span></b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif""> Robert Bruninga [mailto:<a href="mailto:bruninga@usna.edu">bruninga@usna.edu</a>] <br><b>Sent:</b> Monday, June 01, 2015 9:19 AM<br><b>To:</b> <a href="mailto:amsat-bb@amsat.org">amsat-bb@amsat.org</a><br><b>Cc:</b> <a href="mailto:bruninga@usna.edu">bruninga@usna.edu</a><br><b>Subject:</b> PSAT digipeater is ON</span></p></div></div><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">I just turned on the PSAT digipeater. You will notice that its callsign in this mode is just “PSAT” and not PSAT-1 when it is in SAFE mode.</p><p class="MsoNormal">The ALIASes supported are ARISS and APRSAT.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">The PSK-31 transponder also remains in AUTO mode meaning it will come up whenever there are PSK31 signals on the 28.120 + frequency.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal">Bob, WB4APR</p></div></body></html>