I've been enjoying the posts regarding our last HEO satellite, AO-40. I was
inactive while AO-40 was going strong, but the posts brought back memories of
our first HEO, OSCAR 10, my first experience with satellites until a couple of
years ago. You can't find much about the glory days of AO-10 on the web, but I
remember them well.
Passes lasted for 8 hours. Always Q5 copy everywhere in the huge footprint,
very little QRM or QRN. I worked over 100 countries from 1983-85, but never
got enough cards for DXCC. My rig was a Yaesu FT-726R with a Mirage D-1010
amp. It was 70cm uplink, 2 meters downlink. I attached the antennas to a
small mast on my chimney. I had a surplus cavity bandpass filter that wiped
away all the birdies; it was needed because I lived in EL49 in New Orleans.
The antennas were small crossed-yagis (KLM?), circularly polarized, on separate
booms. I can't recall the make or model. Also must have had a mast-mounted
preamp and an az-el rotator, but I can't remember them. I got the tracking
info from a program that ran on my Commodore 64 and printed it out on my
Gorilla Banana printer.
Those were halycon days, with AO-10 supposed to be just the beginning. The
grand plan was to put up 3 linked ham sats in geosynchronous orbit, which would
enable any ham to work any other ham anywhere on the globe 24-7. Will we ever
see anything like that again? How did AO-10 compare with AO-40?
There was a fire at my home and all my logs and QSL cards from those days were
lost. If anyone out there happens to have an old AO-10 QSL card from me, I'd
sure appreciate a copy.
73, Bill NZ5N
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