[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

[aspenmayer]

Thank you for your response.

I am not active much on GH, but mine is:

https://github.com/aspenmayer

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

Wasn’t yet following you on Twitter, but was already subbed on YT. I see you, but I don’t recognize you. I will review my history to appreciate further your contribution(s) to my present state.

I am going to DEF CON. I hope to see you there, but if not this year, perhaps sometime soon irl or online.

To circle back, how did this happen:

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

Specifically, how did they know

> that I had an Oscar 10/13 satellite station

?

Are there people fox hunting recreationally, all the time?

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