Amateur radio operators have built and orbited over 50 satellites since the
first one was launched in 1961. The AMSAT web site has a very good
history of amateur satellites that goes back to the very beginning and
covers every satellite briefly up to the present day. There are
currently around 2 dozen operational amateur satellites.
Some of these have
analog
transponders that relay mostly voice and CW signals and some have
digital
transponders that relay one of several different data formats.
Although Jim was able to watch the launch of OSCAR-8 on 5 March 1978 from
Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California he did not actually start
operating via satellites until 21 years later. He has been quite
active since on all of the analog satellites. In March of 2001 Jim
was awarded the W4AMI Satellite Operator Award #33 from AMSAT for logging
1000 satellite QSOs. In July of 2001 Jim was awarded the ARRL's
Worked All States #285 and VUCC #108 awards, both for satellite
operating.
In September of 2000 Jim has started co-ordinating the North American voice
passes on
SunSat
(SO-35). He continued doing so until SO-35 failed in orbit
in early 2001.
Much more information about amateur satellites can be found from
AMSAT-NA.At the end of 2000 Jim started making recordings of some satellite passes from his station in the Los Angeles area and have posted some of these here. For those of you in less populated areas of the world, you can get an idea just how busy some of the US passes of the FM satellites are. There are recordings of passes from most of the analog satellites.
In February of 2002, Jim started using spare CPU cycles for the
SETI@Home project as part of the
AMSAT team. SETI@home is a project that uses idle CPU cycles
on millions of individual users computers to perform complex analysis of
received data in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. You
can see my stats as part of SETI@Home by clicking
here.
