What is Roving in Amateur Radio Satellite Operations?

 I have been hearing about Satellite Roving on Twitter very often and wondered what it was and just thought of finding it out. Satellite Roving is simply operating satellites using portable Amateur Radio equipment from a grid square other than your home location. If you are a little adventurous, you can go to rare and difficult to access grids and other hams will be very happy to work you, if you have informed them well in advance! There is also an AMSAT Rover Award awaiting active Satellite Rovers.


Rovers often post their schedule over X or on hams.at so that others can look out for them. There is usually a rush on satellite passes where rovers are active, to get those rare grids. Roving activity is more often on linear satellites and satellites with higher footprints like IO-117 when it was active. Some work the Geostationary Amateur Radio Satellite Qatar Oscar 100 also during roving activities. When no other satellites are available, they also go for regular FM satellites. Recently there was a record making contact over QO-100 from Newfoundland.

So what is a grid square? Grid squares are a simple method of describing your general location anywhere on Earth. One grid square measures one degree latitude by two degrees longitude. Total number of grid squares on the globe would be 32,400. Measurement of the grid square in Kilometers or Miles would vary depending on the region and will become smaller as you approach the poles. Hundred grid squares are grouped into a grid field. Grid field is indicated by two letters and grid square will have two numbers in addition to the letters indicating the field. Usually grid squares are mentioned during contacts in VHF bands and above. As per one of the grid locator maps I found my grid location as MK71.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Six Button Wireless Mouse vs Three Button Mouse

Image
 When I started using computers long back, mouse had only two buttons, a left and a right button. Then came three button mouse with an extra scroll button. I have read that there was also a single button mouse, but I have not seen one. Now here is a six button mouse, that too a wireless mouse with a USB-A Nano Dongle and 2.4 Ghz wireless connection. In the earlier era, mouse had a rolling ball which would gather dirt and sometimes stop functioning well. Now we have optimal mouse which uses a red light source and an optical sensor instead of the rolling ball. The wireless mouse works on a single 1.5 V, AA battery with a projected battery life of one year!
Read more

Debut Ham Radio Technical Discussion Net on 7065 kHz, 1:45 am UTC (7.15 am IST)

Image
Started by calling CQ on 7065 kHz using my automated CQ call which I had described yesterday. VU3RFT joined first followed by VU2EHA. Had a good discussion on Center Fed and End Fed Dipole Antennas. VU2EHA and VU3RFT participated. All of us were using inverted V dipole antennas. VU2EHA had 40 and 20m dipoles on same mast. VU3RFT was using 1:1 current balun. I mentioned that I am using 40/10m center fed dipoles with 1:1 current balun. VU2EHA asked about 15m dipole. I suggested that the 40m dipole will work well on 15m as it is an odd harmonic. He mentioned a problem because his IC-718 does not have an autotuner. We lost propagation at around 7.35 am IST. Wonder whether there was a geomagnetic storm? Number of waterfalls on 40m band decreased very much at that time. Planning to try again tomorrow at the same time. SWLs can monitor at  http://vu3wew.ddns.net:8073/ , the OpenWebRX by VU3WEW, located about 10km from here and likely to pick up my signals very well. Being a WebSDR, it can be
Read more

Building a Tape Measure Yagi for LEO Satellite Operations

Image
 The Moxon Yagi which I have been using for my LEO Satellite operations had a Moxon rectangle for VHF and five UHF Yagi elements which were passively coupled to the VHF Moxon driven element. The gain was not that high when I thought of working SO-121 QRP satellite. VU2TEK had good success with his Tape Measure Yagi which motivated me to go for one. But I don't expect the same success as he was operating outdoors, pointing the Tape Measure Yagi in the direction of the satellite pass. I am planning to use only in a mast mounted fashion which will limit its usability for satellite passes to a short period of about 4 minutes. I have chosen the DK7ZB design which I have been looking at for a quite a long time. That design has 5 elements for VHF and 8 elements for UHF with a boom length of about 1.5m. First step was to get a wooden reaper to use as the boom. Earlier it used to be available in all electrical wiring accessories shops. But now with the usage of PVC channels for wiring, I w
Read more