[drmpeg]

Back in the early 90's, I worked with some guys that were in the San Jose State radio club, W6YL. Although Field Day is not a contest, these guys really really wanted to finish in the top 10 for class 2A.

They found out that I had an Oscar 10/13 satellite station and begged me and my buddy to operate with them (there's bonus points for a satellite contact). So my buddy and I were "hired guns". We had never attended San Jose State and were not members of the club.

These guys were definitely serious. We operated from a huge ranch in the Sunol hills and they erected wire beams for 80 and 40 meters. They did finish in the top 10 the two years my buddy and I participated.

[aspenmayer]

> They found out that I had an Oscar 10/13 satellite station

Personally, or you had access to one? I am a hobbyist and amateur, so I don’t know how significant this is, but I want to learn!

[drmpeg]

I had the equipment. 2-meter SSB/CW receiver, 70cm SSB/CW transmitter, large 2-meter and 70cm yagi antennas and an azimuth/elevation rotator.

Oscar 10 and 13 were amateur satellites in HEO (Molniya) orbit. They were super fun to operate since the passes lasted for hours.

[aspenmayer]

Did you have to do anything nonstandard to assist the team? I find the whole hobby rather interesting and want to get more into it. My grandparents’ old C/Ku band receiver and giant dish led to discovering some trunk feeds and started my curiosity, but most of my radio work has involved WiFi. With WiFi, the use case and radios available without a license somewhat limited what I even thought to try.

I guess I’ll see if there is a local club I can join to meet some folks and see what they’re doing.

What did you normally use the equipment for, since you weren’t in the club prior to your contact with the record breaking group?

[drmpeg]

I used the equipment for the same reason, to communicate through the Oscar 10 and 13 satellites at home. Oscar 10 was launched in 1983. At that time, I was living in an apartment. I strung up some smaller yagis on the balcony that fortunately faced towards the southwest. I was able to use some, but not all passes of the satellite.

I also used the equipment for terrestrial communications. When I started renting a house, I put up a large yagi for 2-meters. With SSB, you can make contacts out to about 300-400 miles. Enough for contacts between Silicon Valley and the Los Angeles area.

I also made much longer distance contacts with that station with special propagation modes. Meteor bounce, sporadic-E and trans-Pacific (Hawaii) ducting (about 2400 miles).

For the 70cm equipment, I participated in VHF/UHF contests with multioperator groups. This is where we'd go to mountain tops to operate. I was lucky enough to operate from Mt. Pinos a couple of times before ham radio was banned from there. Mt. Pinos is a 8847 ft. mountain at the southern end of the central valley and by far the best location for VHF/UHF operating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinos

Of course, this was in the 80's and 90's. Nowadays, weak signal VHF/UHF may not be very active where you live.

[aspenmayer]

> For the 70cm equipment, I participated in VHF/UHF contests with multioperator groups.

Why?

This is a genuine question! I know I am genuinely uninteresting because I don’t know why I would do this if there wasn’t already a built-in audience. This seems adjacent to shouting into the void if one doesn’t already know that there are listeners/receivers. Why does anyone do this at all?

[drmpeg]

It's an organized event, just like Field Day. The most popular one is in June, since sporadic-E propagation on 50 MHz is available.

https://www.arrl.org/june-vhf

To be honest, I've pretty much phased out on conventional ham radio. The last time I was out in the field was 2010. These days all my ham radio activity is for SDR (Software Defined Radio) development testing. Here's my Github.

https://github.com/drmpeg

And here's a demo video of my open source ATSC 3.0 transmitter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLn5L-k4EPA

[firesteelrain]

You can work the ISS fairly easily from your backyard with an Elk or Arrow antenna and full duplex radio like D72A. I have worked astronauts. During COVID, we all used to get on the satellites as part of late night passes at like 1am and make contacts with each other.

[grendelt]

You don't even need full duplex. Just an HT that will do "split".

[firesteelrain]

No, you need FD to hear yourself. Anyone who does this every day will tell you FD is the only way. Otherwise you are stepping on people

[epcoa]

> Although Field Day is not a contest, these guys really really wanted to finish in the top 10 for class 2A.

That’s literally a contest. If the scoring was private maybe I’d agree.

Field Day may serve other purposes too, but it’s a contest, if not purely so.

[drmpeg]

It's certainly a contest for some groups, but I can't say what percentage that would be. There's many many groups that aren't even remotely competitive and for some groups it's primarily a social event.

When we participated with W6YL, we had our own tent, food, and mass quantities of beer. Aside from folks stopping by the tent out of curiosity, it was not a social event at all.

One guy who was a master CW operator wanted to see how the satellite worked. We hooked his keyer up to the 70cm transmitter and let him go at it. At first, hearing his own signal after a 250 millisecond delay confused him a little but I turned the receive audio down to help him out.

[firesteelrain]

That’s like saying POTA is a contest which it isn’t