2 meter up, Scanner down?

[N9GSU]

Please forgive the newbie question! Even though I've been a ham for 20 years, I've never done anything with the satellites.

My XYL got her ticket last week (She got tired of listening and wanted to start talking!!! WhooHooo!) and is interested in the sats.

Is it possible to use a 2 meter HT for the uplink, and a handheld scanner to listen, with a decent antenna, or is a scanner generally not sensitive enough?

73 de N9GSU

[KD8KSN]

Please forgive the newbie question! Even though I've been a ham for 20 years, I've never done anything with the satellites.

My XYL got her ticket last week (She got tired of listening and wanted to start talking!!! WhooHooo!) and is interested in the sats.

Is it possible to use a 2 meter HT for the uplink, and a handheld scanner to listen, with a decent antenna, or is a scanner generally not sensitive enough?

73 de N9GSU

I am newer to the birds as well (since November 2009). Coming from a person with limited experience, I would say that the sensitivity of the receiver is not as important as the antenna itself. I would highly reccommend a yagi of some sort, many of which are homebrew. I have never worked any of the SSB/CW birds, which might require a more sensitive receiver, but as far as the FM birds go, I would say the antenna setup is more important than the sensitivity of the receiver itself. I could probably stand correction, though.

I use a Kenwood THG71 HT (5W) and would reccommend a dual band HT if you are in the market for a new radio (one with full duplex built in would be great!). I would highly reccommend starting out on AO51 ( http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/satellites/satInfo.php?satID=1&retURL=/satellites/status.php). If you like AO51, I woud then reccommend AO27 (http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/satellites/satInfo.php?satID=1&retURL=/satellites/status.php) and if you still would like more, I would highly reccommend HO68 (http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/satellites/satInfo.php?satID=116&retURL=/satellites/status.php). HO68 is a LEO bird, but it has a much larger footprint than AO51 and AO27. It is a really fun bird to work because of the amount of land area that is covered during a pass.

You may also want to listen to some satellite recordings before actually making a satellite QSO. Here is a link to a fellow Ham that works the birds that posts recordings to his website (http://www.papays.com/sat/).

If you have any further questions, feel free to contact me via my email address listed on my QRZ page.

73...DE...KD8KSN

[AJ4EM]

I've built the UHF half of a WA5VJB "Cheap Yagi" and I can hear the FM birds with my dual-band TH-G71A. Kent has some great setups using that design including a diplexer. But I think I would actually like to hear the downlink of my own transmissions, at least later on listening to the tape. So having a scanner on the UHF half of the handheld antenna, and the 2m transmitter on the other half, no diplexer would be required and it would get the whole conversation on the downlink. Lacking a full-duplex rig, which is overkill for any other use of a H/T I could imagine, this setup seems like it ought to work well.
I don't believe a scanner will pick up SSB but I'm not sure about CW.

[KD8KSN]

I've built the UHF half of a WA5VJB "Cheap Yagi" and I can hear the FM birds with my dual-band TH-G71A.

Glad to hear someone else that has a similar HT - I love the TH-G71 - especially the speaker! Not sure what the difference is between G71 and G71"A".......

To get a little more specific, I use the Arrow dual bad yagi and have the duplexer as well. I still cannot operate full duplex because the radio is only half-duplex. There is an HT out there, I believe by ICOM, that was designed to be a satellite HT and has full duplex built in. Obviously you can't use this for the SSB birds, but it would be sweet for the FM LEOs! The ICOM 910H (discontinued) is also a great radio for the FM and SSB/CW birds.

73...DE...KD8KSN

[AJ4EM]

I'm pretty sure the "A" in "TH-G71A" is just that it's for the USA market, there's a little difference here and there between that and those intended for Europe or Japan, I think.

H/Ts are useful. Using a dual-band H/T with an Arrow or clone is about as minimalist as it gets for sats. But that's only going to work for FM. My TH-F6A can receive SSB but not transmit. For listen ONLY, that will work. But to have a QSO you aren't going to get it done with an H/T, you need something like a 706MkIIg or the Yaesu (817 I think it is?) along with the ability to use both hands, meaning you need an antenna on a pole perhaps with rotators and such... a computer to handle the frequency shifts, point the antennas, show the footprint of the sat on the map...

Nothing wrong with the H/T and arrow, especially for a beginner. If you have a 2m and a scanner, give it a try, the worst that happens is it doesn't work too good. An Arrow or the WA5VJB will always be useful, no harm starting there.

[KD8KSN]

It all depends on what your goal is - and where you live. If you want to talk to DX every day, then you are going to need more than an HT (FT-817nd,FT-857d, IC-910h), but if your goal is to get WAS, VUCC, or just to have a little fun, the Arrow and HT work great. I live in central Ohio, EN80sd, and I have been able to work stations from Venezuela to France to Alaska on my HT and Arrow - 5 watts, no preamp. I do think that when it comes to something like Hawaii, 4,ooo miles away, you have to go to a bird like AO-7 that is SSB.

Just my 2 cents......

[KI6ZON]

I have operated AO-51 using my 2-meter HT with a half-wave telescoping whip and my dad's scanner hooked up to a mag-mount with a piece of metal as a groundplane. I was able to hear it weakly, but the BNC to SMA adapter broke at the beginning of the pass :(, so I wasn't able to talk. I used a dial compass and a protractor to guess where the satellite was.

73!
Sutter
KI6ZON

[K0SPN]

I'm not an expert, and hopefully someone with more knowledge will reply too, but I would think that a diplexer should be used if you're going to use a scanner for listening while you're transmitting.
I don't think that scanners have much filtering and you would risk damaging it.
You could add an external bandpass filter in front of the scanner. Would be an easy circuit to build and cheap if you already had the parts.

Maybe you already though of it, but you would need headphones for the scanner to avoid feedback.

[M3ONL]

Watch this video to answer original posters question http://www.youtube.com/user/2e0hts#p/a/0E2BBCB1012C5EB5/0/LC9bF2Oy1Dw

M3ONL

[AJ4EM]

I'm not an expert, and hopefully someone with more knowledge will reply too, but I would think that a diplexer should be used if you're going to use a scanner for listening while you're transmitting.
I don't think that scanners have much filtering and you would risk damaging it.
You could add an external bandpass filter in front of the scanner. Would be an easy circuit to build and cheap if you already had the parts.

Maybe you already though of it, but you would need headphones for the scanner to avoid feedback.

I think the idea being, the scanner is not in any way connected to the transmitter... the 2m antenna is connected to the H/T, the 440 antenna to the scanner, not intermixed, no diplexer involved.

The diplexer allows the same connector on a dual-band radio to use either/or depending on the band. We're not attempting to connect two antennas to anything here, so no diplexer has a place to put it.

[K0SPN]

If you're using completely separate antennas, then no diplexer or other filter should be necessary, if there is a reasonable separation between the antennas; or like a yagi up with a 1/4 wave for receive.

But if you try this with an Arrow (or similar) antenna, I think you will get a decent amount of 2m RF back down the 440 side and I doubt that a typical scanner would like to see that.
This is what my post was about.

[KA3FYU]

I've tried this - didn't work too well.

You can certainly listen to AO-51 (for example) with a scanner. But when I held the Arrow Beam and HT in one hand, and my scanner in the other...upon Tx, the HT completely overloaded the scanner (no damage, though).