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Thursday, April 7, 2011

PACKET MYSTERY FROM SPAAAAACE!

OK guys, please reach back into your memories, back to the late 80's, back to those sad days before the internet, back to the days of TNCs and packet BBSs and all that. I need some help.

I have my little 2 meter packet station running. I'm sending out beacon packets on 145.825 MHz, the freq of the International Space Station. (Is PC-SAT still on that freq also?)

Every morning I go to the old 1994 Satellite Pro computer (thanks to ZL3KE!) and type in mheard to see the list of stations picked up during the most recent passes of the space station. Every day there are several, each with an asterisk indicating that the packets were digipeated, and on this freq the digipeating is done in space.

Here's my question: Two days ago, MY OWN CALLSIGN showed up in the MHEARD list. (Cue ominous music) BUT WITHOUT THE ASTERISK! If I had seen the asterisk, I would have thought that my own packets were being digipeated by the ISS station and coming back at me. But why no asterisk? Long Delayed Echo? Klingons? My misunderstanding of packet technology?

1 comment:

  1. Hi Bill,

    I dug up my KPC-3 manual to have a look. An asterisk indicates the station was heard through a digipeater (in your case, probably the ISS).

    Though I'm not 100% sure why your MHEARD entries don't! Maybe running MHEARD L will give you the answer.

    If you don't have a copy of the KPC-3 manual, you can get a PDF here:

    http://www.kwnet.net/n7qqu~/eq-manuals/KPC-3_reference_manual.pdf

    Have a good day and 73
    Mike
    K2MTS

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