Long distance Oscar 7 contact

On January 8, Pirajá, PS8RF had a DX contact with Andre, ZS2BK via the Amateur Radio satellite OSCAR 7 - the distance, an amazing 7694 km.

OSCAR 7 was launched on November 15, 1974 and is still going strong over 35 years later. It is testimony to the high standard of Amateur Radio satellites that it is still operating after all these years.

On the AMSAT Bulletin Board Pirajá, PS8RF posted this description of the contact:

I posted a short video with the contact maintained today with Andre, ZS2BK via AO-7 in mode B ( Orbit 60848 - 19:47 UTC - 01/08/10 ). We keep the QSO with a small window that the AO-7 has provided us. The window was only about 34 sec, this time interval we could not match any commit error. The distance between the two stations is 4085 miles or 7694 Km.

Andre wrote via email:
"My Doppler calc was also gratefully spot on. For example I calculated that I should call so that my downlink is on 145.944.2 MHz I worked out that our Doppler difference would be 3.8 khz and amazing that was spot-on. There is really no time to tune !"

Andre is right the time was too little for adjustments. Taking also into account that I manually worked the rotor and control of my rig.

Watch the video of the contact Satellite AO-7

AO7 Log and Resources Site
http://www.planetemily.com/ao7/

Online Satellite Pass Predictions (select AO-7)
http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/tools/predict/

Join the AMSAT Bulletin Board AMSAT-BB at
http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/tools/maillist/

Getting started on Amateur Radio Satellites PDF
http://www.uk.amsat.org/content/view/408/168/

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