[aprssig] IGates with good ears

[Robert Bruninga]

The IGates below have good ears.  You can see a statistic 
on the quality of your IGate receiver by going to pcsat.aprs.org.
It can confirm that your station can hear a 2 Watt APRS signal
from 800 to 2000 miles away direct.

PCSAT-11 has a downlink on 144.39 over the USA and
so once every minute 6 times a day for about 10  minutes
(for the ast 3 years), these weak 2 watt signals from 800 to 
2000 miles away are transmitted (in your area).  If your local
 APRS channel j ust happens to be silent for any of those weak 
seconds,  then your IGate may hear it and feed the packet to APRS-IS.

It doesnt take much coax loss to never hear these signals
at all even if the channel is quiet.  So it is not unusual
for APRS packet stations to work just fine on the overlaoded
144.39 frequency, yet actually be quite deaf.  Again, this
really doesnt matter much...

But anyway, if your station DOES capture the signal, then
you have proof that your station CAN hear a weak 2 Watt
APRS station at a great distance away.  Just today I noticed
these IGates heard PCSAT-11:

WP4MXB-3:   3 times
AA5ED-10:
WA4SAS-11
KE4TZN:  5 times
KD7QOT-1:
KF4YPK-2:
W1GRE: twice
N5API-4:
K9IU-10:  twice
N0NHJ-5:
VE3JJA:
KC0QWN-10:
N4BSA:
N0QVB-1:
AA1XD:
VE3TEJ: three times
KA0MOS-1: twice
VE9GFI-1:
N1GAU-15: twice
VE3JJA: twice

Just because you are not on here, does not mean anything.
But if you ARE on here, then it is bragging rights to a good
antenna and low loss system (and alucky break in the QRM)..

Just a factoid.

PCsat has been fully operational since 26 Jan, but just today 
whent back into its crsh-every-orbit routine, so this tid-bit
will be less usefull in the future..

de WB4APR, Bob

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