When I was active on the linear transponders of AO6 through to AO13 I never used a satellite duplex radio, always separates. We had much better satellites then, in decent orbits like AO-10. So Yaesu in particular brought out lovely expensive duplex radios. Great! However then the linear sats gradually died and were replaced by digital radio sats. Some FM one channel toy sats, but nothing like the old wide linear transponders.
Only recently with FunCube and the Chinese Sats have we started to get linear voice transponders back, but again in low fast moving orbits. Many are now making use of SDR dongles or other SDR receivers as their receiver for sats, because they have many advantages over the old way of just being able to listen to your own receive channel. With an SDR and panoramic can see all of the passband of the transponder or transponders on multiple satellites at once. You can point and click on a signal of interest. Record the whole pass and play it back and see who you missed in the very short pass. You can run the SDR on a tablet computer in the field, and have more capability than your old FT-736R of olden days. In short, until we have high orbit transponders on VHF UHF like AO-10/13 no manufacturer is going to produce an FT-736R replacement. Any plans for a geostationary satellite would not use VHF UHF, but microwave to get the bandwidth required for a third of the world trying to access it at one time all the time. Things have moved on, a single duplex box isn't what is needed. A transmitter CAT coupled to an SDR panoramic receiver is much better. Point on the screen on the signal you see and with Doppler corrected software set the transmitter you have via CAT to the uplink frequency. It is also magnitudes cheaper. 73 from David GM4JJJ ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to [email protected]
