The VK2DJG blog

I was looking back through some old log books, as you do, when I realised that it’s been quite some time since I worked anybody through an amateur radio satellite. My current excuse is that I don’t have any suitable antenna - but that excuse will disappear once I get some new antennas up (after the new tower goes up, etc).

According to the log book, I made 8 contacts on December 15, 1974 through OSCARs 6 and 7. I didn’t record which contact was through which satellite, so I can’t say which satellite was used to give me my first satellite contact. OSCAR-6 had been operational for a couple of years by then, but OSCAR-7 had only been recently launched a month before. I remember transcribing the telemetry which was being sent in CW, and, I think, sending it off to AMSAT-UK.

In my case I was using the 2m uplink, 10m downlink transponder. My 2m antenna would have been a 10-ele yagi, with a longwire being used on 10m. The memory gets a bit hazy here, but I think that at that point in time I was using a borrowed Belcom “Liner 2″ transceiver, with 10 watts output on SSB.