CTARC Morningstar's QO-100 Satellite Station - 2 May '20

A dish antenna to work the Es-hail 2 /  QO-100 geostationary satellite has recently set up at the CTARC's remote station at Morningstar. This amazing feature has been discovered by many of our club members, enabling them to work transcontinental DX via satellite. If you are a licensed radio amateur, you can too!

To gain access to this great feature, you need to be a CTARC member [details here] and have also taken out the annual subscription to access the Morningstar Remote Station. However, those with access to Morningstar get free access to the QO-100 Satellite transceiver as well.

Working the Satellite has a learning curve - you need to be able to ensure that activating QO-100's linear transponder doesn't transmit downlink signal on the wrong frequency! Therefore all those members with Morningstar access who would like to also us the QO-100 feature need to contact the CTARC Secretary [here] to register. She will then send you links to an instructional PDF by Tjerk ZS1J and video by Chris ZS1CDG that explain how the system works.

CTARC Report-back on March Meeting - 23 Mar '19

Our March meeting, held at 14h00 on Saturday 23 March, was very well attended as Tom Ambrose’s talk on operating the LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites was a big draw card.

Many hams confuse working the more sophisticated SSB satellites with the simple FM birds. Tom explained how easy it was to work these flying FM repeaters with just a dual-band handheld radio or with separate 2 metre and 70 cm mobile radios. He went back to Sputnik and the evolution of satellites right up to today’s most recent birds.

Great software for tracking the satellites is available free of charge on the web for both PCs and Android devices. Tom gets excellent results with just vertical antennas mounted on his bakkie. He enjoys driving around RSA and working from various Maidenhead grid squares as many satellite operators collect different grid squares like a DXer does different countries.

A most interesting meeting and I am sure it will result in a few more ZS1 call signs being heard from space.

Rob ZS1SA

We were prepared for load-shedding...