LEO ⁽²⁾

I came across a post about the UmKA-1 (RS40S) cubesat and it broadcasting SSTV images - nearly missed it, I must read more as I usually only take notice of the ISS events. Anyway, I managed to receive two pictures, one sadly not so good. I missed one pass that would have been good, at least it sounded good on the TS2000X but the PC's USB ports had decided they did not want to play. Grumble. But here are the two images I did get: Info on the cubesat can be found at https://db.satnogs.org/satellite/SDUV-9624-5611-1090-5908

My first LEO contact... FT4 from the RS-44 satellite (https://amsat-uk.org/tag/rs-44/). The software used in the excellent OscarWatch software from MM9SQL running, in my case on Windows 11. The software and information can be found at https://oscarwatch.org/. My rather simple (these days!) brain found the software very intuitive (after I bothered to read the basic info!) and easy to set up. The software drives the TS2000X directly, putting it into Sat mode and handling the VHF and UHF VFOs and modes. Audio interfacing is via the SignaLink and the antenna is the usual QFH in the loft. Among other things it has FT4 built in and will report to Pskreporter and the OscarWatch website, the latter having a spot facility at https://oscarwatch.org/spots. It logs completed FT4 QSOs automatically and will export as ADIF as well as uploading directly to QRZ, Cloudlog (also from MM9SQL) and others. The other thing of note is I have started to use data from the MQTT feed of pskreporter. This comes courtesy of M0LTE and information can be found at https://www.mqtt.pskreporter.info/. I wrote some PHP that subscribes and lists out any reception reports. This makes a handy reference rather than keeping a window open constantly polling for data. These three lines are from my RS-44 activity that gained the above QSO.