Why do you do this????
Many have asked, Why are you interested in ham radio and satellites in particular?
Well, the answer to that is simple. It is fun. I didn’t plan this, it just sort of happened. Here is the story:
I am now 42 years old. Once I was much younger. While growing up in Colorado, my family went to the mountains, as did many other families. Back then, the state was hugely less populated than it is today. There were vast expanses of open space and wilderness, and there were special places. Some of these special places had been around for about 100 years. They were called guest or dude ranches.
Up in the Kawuneeche valley, the western boundary of Rocky Mountain National Park, there were several guest ranches. Green Mountain, Phantom Valley and the Never Summer Ranch were the premier ones. Hidden behind the Never Summer Ranch were the Never Summer Housekeeping Cabins, where I spent much time as a kid. Old Johnny Holzwarth owned the Never Summer Ranch and his sister, Sophie Geek owned the Never Summer Cabins. Their father homesteaded the place in the early part of this century. The Cabins were the homestead.
As I got older, I started riding horses around the area. I made friends with the grandsons of Old Johnny, and they showed me the sites around there. As it became apparent that Old Johnny was going to sell the ranch to the Park, my family found and bought a small plot of land in the Kawuneeche Valley. My dad built a cabin, we moved in and the Holzwarths became part of the colorful history of the area. My late teenage years blossomed and the beckon of college waggled its finger. So off I went for 5 years to the University of Colorado. Due to the rigors of college and social stuff, I did not have much time to go up there. After graduation, the situation completely changed.
I went to work and now had time to go back to the cabin. Horseless, I was on foot, but a healthy 20 something year old male is as good as a horse. I ran up and down the mountains exploring and finding all sorts of stuff. The stuff was old mining sites, the sites of the original settlers who first settled the area. This turned into a big deal and I have been researching the mining history ever since. But I was getting older. My mother worried that I was up there for days at a time with no way to talk to me.
One Christmas morning, a nice new Icom 2SAT HT was lurking under the tree. I had always been interested in ham radio, but now that I had one, it was necessary to get licensed. I passed my no-code Tech license 2 weeks later. In the intervening 8 weeks it took to get my call, I listened around to the local 2 meter repeaters. I heard something amazing. I heard phone calls on the radio! I subsequently discovered this miracle was called an autopatch. I kept monitoring this frequency and I heard a Space Shuttle! Holy Cow! I hadn't heard something like that since Apollo 17! Then one night I heard something called a net. It was a traffic net, and I thought, well this is useful. I wonder why they have traffic reports at 8:00 pm instead of rush hour. I was curious as to what a net was, and they seemed to show up on the repeater every night at 8:00. After a particularly nasty Wednesday, I turned on the radio and heard the Colorado AMSAT Net. Hosted by WD0HHU, Dave, he was saying stuff like talking to Shuttles and that there were a bunch of ham radio satellites up there. He spoke a funny language, with words like keps and uplink and downlink. I heard stuff that made no sense at all, what is a mean motion, or an epoch?
Well, I learned the stuff, got a satellite tracker for my old Apple ][ and one day up in the mountains while I was fishing, I heard a Russian voice on my HT. It was R0MIR, the space station Mir. I called him and he answered! Wow! That was more exciting than anything I'd experienced in quite a while. As time went by, I racked up Space Shuttle SAREX QSOs both packet and voice, and began dabbling in the analog Hamsats.
Dave WB0HHU decided to retire the net about a year and a half ago, and I took it over. We have a hard core bunch of active satellite operators who check into the net every week, and welcome new check ins. The whole point of this is to disseminate as much info as possible so that people can enjoy the thrill as much as I have.
I hope everybody has a sense of humor! I put as much of that as possible in here, the Pinky and the Brain stuff is wonderful. If you havn't seen the show, it may not make much sense, so watch it! If it doesn't rend your sides, you need a humor implant.!
If the page looks funny, you are probably using Netscape. I have tried to make the page as compatible with both Netscape and Internet Explorer, but some items may not work right for Netscape. Check your version. You can download the latest version for free! The pages should work right then.
73 de John N0VSE
