N5BF AMSAT (Auto-) Biography
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The Beginning
I was first licensed in March 1972 (WN5GRZ, then on upgrade,
WB5GRZ) and OSCAR-6 was launched that November. I listened to
OSCAR-6 (and schemed about a two meter uplink capability on essentially
no money) several times. OSCAR-6 was supposed to be the first in
AMSAT's "Phase Two" series, a satellite with a design lifetime of a
year, not just a few weeks. This would allow publicity, etc. to
get a big user base. Worked for me. OSCAR-6 lasted for
three years.
I made contacts through OSCARs 7 and 8 in the late 70s.
Back in the AO-7, 8 days, I was also active on RS-3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
8. That was fun. They were all Mode A (2-meters up,
10-meters down), 3 and 4 were beacons only.
TI-59 Tracking Software
<coming>
AMSAT Phase III-A - Black Friday, 1980
Monday, May 23, 2005 is the 25th Anniversary of what is known
around AMSAT as "Black Friday". This is the day that the first
Phase III (highly elliptical orbit) satellite was launched on the
second Ariane IV launcher.
It was Memorial Day weekend and most of the AMSAT die-hards who had
real jobs (and how could you be an AMSAT die-hard without having a real
job?) had arranged to take a four day weekend, beginning on that
Friday. Launch from Korou was late in the afternoon,
mid-afternoon in the U.S.
I had a brand new job at Houston Cable TV (a subsidiary of Warner) as
an installer/technician. We had just moved from Dallas (where I
had worked as a video-tape editor at KXTX, Ch. 39, part of Pat
Robertson's empire) to the northwest Houston area to help take care of
my father-in-law and his five acre place near Tomball. So, with
one month on the job, I had no time off and went to work in the warm
humidity that day in anxious anticipation. There was no local
coverage on VHF and no opportunity to for me to listen anyway, as I
drove around in Unit #10 servicing irate customers, drilling holes in
their walls, digging trenches in their yards, so I was really ready for
quitting time, for getting home, perhaps during Orbit #0 to listen to
what would now be called "AMSAT Launch Information Network" on 80
meters, and maybe OSCAR-9 beacons from geosynchronous transfer space on
2....
(My father-in-law died in June and the following year, after making
elaborate Field Day '81 plans, I quit that job at Houston Cable in a
little spat over who would take call that weekend. The network
was not well built out, there had been acquisitions, and these combined
with new construction throughout that corner of the county meant that
being on call typically meant working a 40 hour weekend. On Field
Day? Are you kidding? Anyway, I was tired of being accused
by non-subscriber neighbors of bringing porn into their neighborhoods
with this new-fangled cable TV thing anyway and, at any rate, couldn't
get the service myself because I didn't live in our service area.)
Phase III A had had it's own rough winter. Late in testing, for
example, they had discovered that the harness for the two meter tripole
actually caused it to be left hand circularly polarized rather than
right handed. Word had been put out on the nets immediately, but
this had meant lots of devout supporters climbing towers in the dead of
winter and bringing down hand-built antennas to make hard
switches. (This was long before M2
or Hygain caught on to any potential market.) Jan, W3GEY was
heard to say that designing, building, and loading a tripole to do what
you thought it would was ... "tricky".
Keep in mind that, up to that time, all the ham satellites had been
LEO. Oscars 7 and 8 were still working. OSCAR 7 alternated
between Mode B and Mode A with a 432 MHz beacon. (That beacon had
required a waiver, as the 435 - 438 MHz satellite band did not yet
exist and 432 was not anywhere part of the Amateur Satellite
Service. It also had an S-Band beacon which they had never been
able to get authorization to turn on, although it was seen to
accidentally false on once in a while as they lost control late in
AO-7s first life. The beacon was never copied, only seen to be
powered from telemetry.) AO-8, a side-gig by the ARRL, actually
to bridge the gap between Phase II and Phase III (OSCAR 7 was getting
old) had modes A, J, and AJ, and, of course "off / recharge" which was
UTC Wednesdays, which is why all the HF nets were on Tuesday evening.
My rig was the Argonaut 509 (with 405 "linear"). Using the
receiver from my second ham station, a Hallicrafter's SX-111 and later
a second Argonaut 515, I was building up a satellite station from
converters, mostly Hamtronics kits. So far, I had 10 to 2 for
transmitting and a PA that went to something like 25 watts. I had
homebrewed a 2 meter ten element (five in each plane) yagi and a 70 cm
helix and had them on a telephone pole with rotators. (Later all
this would be remoted to the middle of a pasture 300 feet from the
shack with everything including local battery power and a full up ten
meter turnstile, but that's a different story). I was making
contacts on Mode A, had finished a 2 meter receive converter and had
monitored mode B. I had a 70 cm receive converter working and had
monitored the OSCAR 7 beacon on that new helix too. On launch day
I was still soldering on the 70 cm transmit converter but was ready to
throw a switch and listen to the OSCAR-9 beacon.
P3A was going to be Mode B only, but that was fine. It had a
solid fuel kick motor and so probably would have been the only amateur
satellite propulsion system to have worked correctly, had it had the
chance. There was enough ISP to get from 5 degrees to 57 degrees
inclination, near the Molniya point which would have favored the
northern hemisphere at first then drifted around to the southern if it
lasted enough years. This would not be sun-synchronous.
Those long periods of availability into Europe or wherever would be
distributed throughout the day and night as the seasons passed.
I tell this long story to give some idea of the worldwide anticipation
on May 23, 1980, as I experienced it in my own small way. Amateur
Radio was about to move into a new era, one of routine, (if irregular)
intercontinental, long period access on VHF and UHF. Jan King was
particularly happy that it was all over. There is a picture in an
AMSAT magazine of the period showing him on the phone from Korou
talking to somebody back in the states (maybe his poor, long suffering
wife). The satellite was all closed out and buttoned up, never to
be touched again. He had a new job lined up working on a
magnetometer for the space shuttle. The one condition of that new
job was "no AMSAT". He, his employer, and his family couldn't
have been happier and it showed on his face in that picture. It
was like a long ordeal was over. He said it was very much like
having a baby.
So, finally I was off work that Friday and got home about dark.
It was going to be a great weekend of listening carefully for that weak
beacon signal from way way out there. The normal nets and
frequencies had been active from late afternoon and into the evening to
cover the news of the day as close to live as possible. All we
had was a telephone hookup to Korou. I plugged in the soldering
iron, tuned on the Argonaut to 3840 and started rummaging for my 70 cm
transmit converter parts. Within five minutes, the news was
repeated. There was no OSCAR 9. I unplugged the soldering
iron. (Eventually I finished that kit, but the 30 watt shoes for it is
under my workbench at home to this day.)
There had been a launch window of something like 90 minutes.
After dealing with some problems, with about 30 seconds remaining, they
thought they were ready and the launch had been approved. The
rocket didn't "sound right" nearly from liftoff, however. It
underperformed significantly and went into the ocean nearby off the
coast.
Later it was learned that unanticipated acoustic resonances had
occurred in the firing chamber of one of the first stage Vulcain
engines causing unexpectedly rapid and therefore "catastrophic"
erosion. (The fix for this was to manufacturer those chambers to
somewhat higher tolerance.) The net effect was that power output
was far below spec. By the time that (parts of) the rocket
cleared the beach it was in serious trouble. Everything went into
the sea somewhere on the way to Devil's Island, including the three
solar cells that I had sponsored for $10 each (out of my $5.11 / hour
income!).
A search was conducted. Observers in helicopters saw cannisters
of another payload, "Firewheel" floating in the water. (Firewheel
was supposed spray some florescent stuff into the Van Allen belts so we
could see them in color at night.) Karl Meinzer speculated that
the Phase III A satellite was much less mechanically robust and much
smaller. There was little chance that anything would be seen and
none that anything would be recovered.
Well, our lives all took different turns then. There was some
sort of partial insurance settlement involving Ariane and AMSAT that
was used to fund another try at a Phase III. Jan backed out of
his STS job and was hired by AMSAT for two years with some of that
money. Work on Phase III B soon commenced. This would ultimately
be OSCAR 10, which we still use today, though it had it's own long
history of problems. Due in part to those problems (which were
partially blamed on being bumped by the upper stage after deployment)
there was yet another settlement leading to Phase III C, OSCAR 13,
which was fine until it dug a trench somewhere off South America.
Brand new AMSAT President Tom Clark, W3IWI and his right-hand-man Vern
Riportello, WB2LQQ, dealt with hundreds of pieces of mail offering
condolences or misguided offers of help or suggestions on how to
proceed. Tom, probably the longest standing member of the AMSAT
BoD today, still claims credit for "saving" the institution from this
disaster. Rip (who appointed me AMSAT VP Operations just before
resigning over some silly liability insurance thing) died of a massive
heart attack a few years ago, 1998 I think.
And the OSCAR - 9 designator went to UO-9, the first satellite out of
the University of Surrey, a new paradigm in itself being mostly about
science and engineering rather than communications.
But, as we all know all too well, everybody who works in this business
goes through this once in a while. It's not much fun, work or
play.
Today, of course, it is a different world, partly as a result.
For my own misguided offering, I took time off (which I finally did
have) and flew to Baltimore-Washington in November to spend the weekend
at Jan's house. Met his son Ian who was about ten months younger
than ... OSCAR 7 and his wife Donna who was nearly due with their
daughter Nadia. (Something about the water in Korou was the joke
around the office.) I toured the "fishbowl" the AMSAT lab at
Goddard, and talked seriously with Jan and Tom and Dick Daniels and
Rich Zwirko and others about working for AMSAT on the P III B
project. I saw S-100 based graphic tracking programs, kick motor
test masses, Phase III space frames, and all sorts of other neat stuff.
Well, as a piano major with TV and Cable TV experience, I was not
qualified.
So, that spring, I enrolled in engineering school at the U. of Houston
from which I coop'd at JSC and eventually graduated, Summa Cum Laude,
with Honors, with a thesis about micro-metrology instrumentation in IC
manufacturing. Everybody thought I was doing this for the money,
but I always thought I was doing it for the hobby. When I got my
first real engineering job (at an upstart run by the guy who had been
my boss at JSC), I seriously underbid it, to his great surprise.
Up to that point, I had no idea what the economics of the engineering
profession were like.
And, although that U of H GPA got my resume in the door at JPL, it was
an AMSAT project, the AMS-81 tracking program for the Sinclair ZX-81
computer (yes...) that was one of the two or three main
resume/interview items that ultimately landed me a job at JPL.
Larry Young did not want another post-doc who was interested in their
own minute part of navigation research, earth atmosphere loading, or
solid earth tides, or mysterious forces in the outer solar system, or
third order ionospheric scintillation effects over equatorial regions,
things that other people in 335 do, he wanted someone who could and
would write zeroth or first order navigation software for an embedded
system, the Rogue Receiver.
And, so, here we are today, Black Friday now being eligible for QCWA.
And, so, It is with mixed emotions, as always, that I wish you all a
happier remembrance of a dark day that was a big turning point for
amateur radio, and for me, actually, in unexpected and unpredictable
ways.
End of Phase III A story, continuing with biography:
ZX-81 Tracking Software, 1983
Under the management of then AMSAT Vice President - Operations,
Ralph
Wallio, W0RPK, I wrote a full up (but slow to execute) tabular
satellite tracking program
for the Sinclair ZX-81 computer. These $100 hobbyist systems had
16K
RAM and were programmed in Basic. We had a system that did
visibility
predictions and near-real-time antenna aiming calculations (the
antennas then had to be aimed manually by the operator). At 110
baud,
it took five minutes to load or save into the little Z-80 system from a
cassette tape recorder. That
was the last time I used Basic seriously.
I was picked up to do this because I had submitted a similar program
for the TI-=59 calculator to the AMSAT Software Exchange circa 1980.
Packet Technology Satellite Experiment
- Houston, PTSE-H, 1987
I wrote an article Power
Budget and
Eclipse Considerations for PTSE-H which is more broadly
applicable than to just PTSE-H. That entire edition of the AMSAT Technical Journal V. 1. No.
1, is available here.
An even better and more useful article, dispelling some of the
presumptions that beginners have about communications through low earth
orbit assets, is in the next edition, A
Method for Evaluating Antennas for a Low Earth Orbit Mission, here.
This paper has been cited in at least one PhD dissertation!
AMSAT-NA Vice President - Operations,
1988-1991
AMSAT - North America.
When I was "elevated" to V.P. operations, it was to fill a mid-year
vacancy that resulted from several BoD and officer resignations over a
liability insurance matter. My mentor and ZX-81 software manager,
Ralph, W0RPK (see n5bf/6 ham radio biography page) was among
them. President Vern ("Rip") Ripportello, WA2LQQ, called me up
one day and asked me ("opportunity knocks" was the way he put it)
to be V.P. Technical Operations. He thought that V.P. Operationss
was too big a job for a volunteer and was trying to divide the
responsibility up into Technical Ops and User Ops (award programs and
things like that). I agreed to Technical Ops and he tapped
someone else for User Ops. At the actual board meeting about two
months later, Rip himself had resigned and Doug Loughmiller, then KO5I,
was appointed President. Board member Tom Clark, then W3IWI,
pointed out that the Constitution called for V.P. Operations which, as
such, was currently unfilled. They didn't want to change the
Constitution so Tom moved that I be appointed "V.P. Operations, comma,
nothing." Somewhat used to to the organization by now, I agreed
to this and it was approved. The User Ops guy became an
"additional" position under me, like Field Ops.
The funny thing about all this, thinking back twenty years now, is that
I had no idea what a V.P. Ops of an organization was supposed to
do. On paper I was third in command of the organization,m as
people who wanted me to order V.P. Engineering Jan King, W3GEY, or
somebody to do something would often remind me). Technically I
was responsible for day-to-day "operations" or AMSAT-NA. Not only
was I clueless about this being my responsibility, I would have been
clueless as to how to carry it out. Luckily, AMSAT-NA has an
exceptional, long term employee in Martha Saragovitz. She
oversees actual operations.
I thought that V.P. Ops covered the vast expanse of radio operation with which AMSAT
was (or should have been) involved. To me that meant running the
command station program, nets, ground technology development and
deployment, things like that. I served for three years and kicked
a lot of butt and made a lot of stuff happen on the
not-satellite-builder, non-fund-raiser side of the house that sorely
needed to happen.
In the 1990 election, when I ran for the AMSAT-NA board of
directors. It was eight people running for three slots and I came
in like sixth place, so didn't even make alternate. I always
thought that this was in part because my name/biographical informaion,
though in alphabetical order, was still fifth on the list, the worst
possible position out of eight. Voting turnout was low that year
and, in retrospect, there were some things I had done or been clueless
about that might have caused people not to vote for me, despite what I had done and would have done on the
board. Tom Clark was the top vote getter and the rest of us were
in, essentially, a seven way tie for last place with only a dozen or so
votes separating each of us. It was just as well, I burned
out and "retired" shortly thereafter anyway.
Gould Smith, WA4SXM,
was one of my recruits. He was one of the thirty or so who had
applied to the "Command Station Development Program," (the "next step"
for you guys who are really nuts about amateur radio satellite
stuff.) I think is was at the Des Moines meeting (1989) or maybe
Houston/JSC (1990) that he came up to me and handed me a "book he had
written" that I might be interested in. It was everything that
was known about every operating satellite! I had been trying to
get something like this done since before being an official
myself. Gould is still with the organization and has done a great
deal for its betterment.
Programs:
AO-13 Operations Net
Command Station Development Program (CSDP)
When I became an AMSAT official, AO-13 was already in orbit and one of
the big things I did was coordinate some formal activity there.
This
was when I was new in California but couldn't really afford to live
here. I ran my satellite station out of the dining room in an 826
square foot rent house. When the (three) kids started getting big
enough to take up a lot of space and need more than just diaper
changing attention, I had to get out of it. I needed to get out
of it
for other reasons anyway. As it happens, the grind of
administration
and the politics of a major volunteer organization are not what I'm in
it for. Discovering that was a useful exercise anyway.
I think that period of time in the late 80s and early 90s when Phase
III was being achieved were indeed the heyday of AMSAT and amateur
radio satellites. I could engage in a protracted discussion of
what
has happened since and what are the encouragements and discouragements
of the current status and outlook, but that's a different chat for a
different day.
I remember Jan King saying once that we needed to have satellites that
were dependable enough (high earth orbit at least if not geosynch) that
we could do meaningful communications for emergencies and public
service, not to mention communications technology research like SARSAT,
which was demonstrated on AO-7. "And," he would say, "it wouldn't
hurt if we saved a few lives while we were at it." It's not clear
that we haven't gone in the other direction from that possibility
lately, but still there is much to be gained and learned from satellite
work that is, at least, applicable elsewhere in several ways.
As for me, I like working with and fundamentally understanding the
techology. As of 2011, despite much personal progress, I haven't
yet reached the point of breaking through to where my work will be
useful to others, but it is coming. That effort is discussed
extensively at the DSP-10 page.
AMSAT-OSCAR 13, 1988 - 1996
AO-13 was a settlement replacement for AO-10 that was damaged by
the upper stage that deployed it (1983) which was a replacement for
Phase III-A that was lost in a launch failure. AO-13 was a useful
high-earth-orbit, nearly Molniya platform with Modes B, J, and L, and
an S-Band beacon. After deployment into GTO it was moved, under
control of amateurs led by Karl, DJ4ZC, to its final orbit through
highly succesful firing of a liquid fuel motor.
I had hundreds of QSOs on AO-13, in all modes and also ran the AMSAT-NA
Operations Net there, attracting dozens of checkins on a quasi-regular
schedule based on when I could see the satellite in view of the rest of
CONUS and other regions of opportunity.
Here are examples of some of the more memorable operations.
Sun 29 Nov 87 1429Z UA0ALA 54/35
435.100/145.902 A-3A 25 1440Z AO-10 orbit 3356 Krasnoyarsk USSR 93E 56N
Ayatol, QSL Sent and Rcvd.
And there's a cryptic note above "Krasnoyarsk" that says "NO65NX"
The notebook for this date (no I don't keep everything, just nearly
everything) is little help, but it does have the additional note "both
SSB, both Q2" See my essay "UR 599 OM,
PSE RPT ALL"
I was then tailended by VK7ZGK, Moss in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
(147E 43S) Not clear why Moss didn't go after Ayatol....
In this search (paper logs...) I found other interesting calls worked
via satellite (AO-10 and AO-13) that I'd forgotten about: UA4NM,
OH5NR, SV3KH, HG2RG, and Y26HO marked "Berlin, East Germany,
Deitmar" The Berlin wall fell in Fall 1989. Apparently
radio regulations lagged then as always.
Most of my satellite log entries are Operations Nets on AO-13 with
25-30 checkins each, but there was never a session without some DX in
it. Lots and lots of JA/VK/ZL, "easy" Europe (DL/G/F/I), and so
forth. Not to mention all the domestic luminaries - W5RRR, W3XO,
etc.
My claim of "Most Memorable QSO" was on AO-13: when WA1THQ/OX
tailended the ops net one day.
http://cbduncan.duncanheights.com/HamRadio/MostMemorable/MostMemorable.html
1990 27 July 435.448.5/145.950.0
CW/SSB 100 0142Z WA1THQ/OX 519/OK 0205 72N 38W 12,000 feet Karen 492
(my satellite QSO # for 1990) (no QSLs)
Karen was a researcher camped out on the Greenland ice sheet taking
core samples. When she talked on SSB it was Q2. She was competent
on CW but had to take off her gloves to key, and it was 20F inside the
tent so there was a constant back and forth.
In the mid 1990s it was discovered that AO-13 would de-orbit
prematurely due to the "Luni-Solar" perturbation on its orbit, a
perturbation that causes the perigee to oscillate with a period of
years. One oscillation made the perigee sub-terranean, somewhere
over the South Atlantic, in 1996. The Russians had learned about
this in the process of inventing the Molniya orbit. They learned
about it the same way we did, but earlier.
AMSAT-OSCAR 16, 1990 - 2010
Here's a paper
about the AMSAT Microsats on which I was a collaborator. I was
the original license trustee for the satellite, launched 1990 January
20.
Of it's group (UO-14, UO-15, AO-16, DO-17, WO-18, LO-19), it was the
last one transmitting. The packet and computer operations failed
after several years but up into 2010 it was commandable into FM up /
DSB down mode on a pass-by-pass basis. This worked during a
no-eclipes portion of its orbit. The last it was heard, that I
know of, was 2010 January 30 but it could be revived again in several
years when another no-eclipse season occurs.
The Burnout, 1991
In April 1991 I burned out badly as an AMSAT
official and had made a clean exit by the end of June. I took a
sabbatical from amateur radio until 1992 and when I returned, got back
to what made it fun for me: building stations, building radios,
building skills, and once in a while doing something useful for
somebody.
The AMSAT-NA annual meeting in Fall of 1991 was held in Los Angeles,
ironically, since I was no longer involved, nor would I talk to anyone
from AMSAT during the six months after my resignation during which the
meeting occurred. In absentia I was given this recognition
plaque. Note my Speaker's Badge from the AMSAT-NA Symposium in
Foster City, Ca, Fall of 2006. It was good to see a lot of the
old guys once again ... and not be in charge of anything.
The speech was about the EME2
on the DSP-10.
Not being interested in officialdom anymore and being interested in
space radio technology for its own sake, here's my little editorial
about what AMSAT is today.
The essential problem at AMSAT is that they pioneered a niche in the
space business that everybody else thought was crazy. They took
spare space on launchers and, for budgets in the round off error of
their professional counterparts, put in meaningful communications
payloads that got launched free of charge. The only cost was that
we had to prove that we were worth launching and wouldn't bother any of
the paying customers. I think P3A beat out something like 90
competitors for space on the ill-fated Ariane 4 launch #2 in May
1980. The team was very capable and professional about this,
though they were all volunteers nearly exclusively.
Eventually the rest of the world caught on. No longer is there
any free lifting space in the
faring of any rocket anywhere, and AMSAT, having succeeded in its own
goal of getting university engineering and science programs interested
in our kind of work, has spawned off the whole university CubeSat
effort that is paying real money to fill up what space is even
available for sale. CubeSats are not AMSAT's competitors, but the
fact is that there is no longer any free launch and there are lots of
people out there with little spacecraft to cram into the remaining
nooks and crannies in any manifest. AMSAT has basically worked
itself out of a job and has not found a new way to go about its
business. Not on what hams think is a reasonable budget,
anyway. We're talking about a few thousand people paying $30 a
year membership dues. Now, if somebody who was good at marketing
went out and made a multi-million dollar pitch and put that money in
the hands of amateurs who knew how to use it (not necessarily the AMSAT
volunteers of today who are technically good but always want to make
things more complicated than can be broadly accepted), something could
still happen, but going from the current precedent, it seems
demonstrably impossible to keep going forward.
I remember doing a school contact with the shuttle once. Someone
asked me if I was going to use AO-13 for the relay back from the 2
meter FM downlink stations in Australia. Well, it makes all kind
of sense but, no, it could never fit together that way nor would it
occur to anyone to try to engineer the global system that way.
In 2010-2011, AMSAT is getting on board with a university CubeSat
project, having realized that that's essentially the only game in town
anymore, on their paradigm.
The AO-40 Era
I'm sorry I missed AO-40 and I'm sorry it broke so that it's not
here today. My dad was sick and died during the time when AO-40
was built and deployed. I just couldn't even get to a place to
even listen to it. AO-40 would have put me on 24 GHz, because it
had a beacon or something there that I would have wanted to have
worked. I read the articles about it in the AMSAT Journal and
drooled.
Since leaving AMSAT officialdom, it has always been a goal to get back
to having satellite capability, largely by building up the station
myself from parts (like transistor sized parts). Tactically this
is fun; I enjoy building things and getting them to work and
understanding what they do. Strategically it isn't working.
It takes a lot more spare time than I have to do it that
way. I still build stuff and write software because that's
what I want to do, but not "every chip, every bit" anymore.
And then there's all those antennas blowing down in the wind all the
time.... Right now my antenna farm is minimal, but I have plans
for a 4-foot dish on 1296, as one example.
created 2011 June 11
updated 2013 February 9