Work a satellite with the radio you have

Not one of the five steps — this is the one to come back for. There are amateur satellites overhead carrying an FM repeater, the same idea as the one on the hill, moving at five miles a second a few hundred miles up. A handheld and its rubber duck can reach them. People work them from parking lots.

The catch is that a pass lasts about ten minutes and then the satellite is gone, so you have to know when to be outside. That is what this page answers: where it comes up, how high it climbs, where it goes down, and the two frequencies and the tone that go in the radio.

Before your first pass

• These are cross-band. You transmit on one band and listen on the other, at the same time. A handheld that cannot do both at once still works — you just will not hear yourself, so you are calling blind.
• Point it. Hold the radio so the antenna is broadside to the satellite, not aimed at it. Face the compass point in the table and tilt back to the elevation.
• Listen first, all the way through. Hearing a pass end to end before you transmit teaches more than any page. Everything you hear is public; nothing is scrambled.
• The frequency drifts as it flies. Doppler pulls the downlink high at the start and low at the end. Program a few channels a couple of kilohertz apart and step down through them as the pass runs.
• Short. One station at a time gets through, so it is callsign, grid square, and thank you. A whole contact is fifteen seconds.
• You are the control operator. Nothing here transmits for you, and the same rules apply as anywhere else on the band.

Orbits come from Celestrak’s public amateur element sets and are computed here; the times are as good as the elements, which is to within a few seconds for a day ahead. Whether a given satellite is switched on is a different question — AMSAT’s status page is where operators report what they actually heard.