karn@eagle.UUCP (Phil Karn) (08/15/83)
The following is the new CW bulletin on the Amsat-Oscar-10 general beacon: "Mode B is on hingain [sic] antennas and signals are normal Do not use more than 500 W EIRP transponder AGC is 20 DB down so pse QRP Mode L experiments will start in Septembre [sic] AMSAT OSCAR 10 HI HI" With virtually no effort at all in the past few days (I've been content to mostly listen) I've worked Ecuador, Netherlands, Germany, Finland, France and England, not to mention plenty of US. Not bad for VHF/UHF! I've heard many of the "famous" moonbounce stations on the satellite (VE7BBG, K2UYH, PA0SSB, etc) and all seem to be complaining that they're having a hard time cutting their transmitter powers so as to avoid overdriving the satellite. With 1-5 watts to their 70cm EME arrays they're still the strongest signals in the passband! If we can get everybody down to more reasonable EIRP levels then everybody will benefit from not having to run so much power. The high gain antennas are still offpointed somewhat. They're in the orbit plane, but rotated about 15 degrees toward the east. This results in steady signals before and at apogee, followed by very noticeable spin fading after apogee. The antennas will probably be correctly pointed by the end of this coming week. Phil Karn, KA9Q