Ah, satellite stuff, ta Andy.
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@G7UFO has/had one. He’s written about it on his site.
I built a QO-100 station a little while ago. Like most projects I do, the research, building and getting everything working is the fun part. After that it’s either long rambling conversations with German/UK hams (who seemed to be the biggest populations on the satellite) or join the masses in chasing new DX/squares when a rover pops up. Once configured everyone is 59 forever.
Sometimes (when the pile up is gone or it’s 7am and they’re in bed) you do get to have a nice chat with someone in a unique place.
There’s a community who try to encourage usage via the usual points/lists/collections as well as periodic mode events etc.
It’s probably been a year or more since I had a QSO on it and I think about dismantling it and selling the expensive parts or repurposing it but yet to do anything.
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It’s a while since this thread was started. I posted that there would be interest in IP80 and the Isles of Scilly. Both trip reports are in links on my QRZ page.
Needless to say there was a big pileup on the IP80 trip from the grid chasers rather than SOTA chasers. I did the first activation in IP80 from the holiday cottage so when I activated the summit the pileup would be more manageable.
The current unique summits activated on QO-100 by me is 71. I still need to activate 3 easy Scottish Grids (IO67 Skye IO68 Harris IO57 St Kilda) and two (IO69 Sula Sgeir and IO79 North Rona) difficult grids and one (IO37 Rockall) impossible grid.
Currently I am a bit limited on chasing with QO-100 because I am looking after my father (98) however I now have the dish in his greenhouse (the tomatoes have been evicted) and am deciding it I put in “mains power plus ethernet” to connect to the TxRx or can it be done using PoE. Is anyone out there using PoE to power their remote TxRx ?
73 de
Andrew G(M)4VFL
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You’re not alone there. And I wonder if SOTA has extra interest in that there’s two parts to it: the actual actvation bit involving walking etc. and then the radio. The combination of 2 different things keeps each part interesting.
There is a sense of achievement in getting QRV on the satellite whether it’s all home made gear or assembled parts and getting QRV should not be dismissed. But there is the issue that because of the fact that lots of the QSOs are straightforward 59 QSOs it can become less satisfying. That should not diminish achievements like Andrew G4VFL who is on the way to activating all the locator squares in the UK on QO-100 (or maybe has done).
In my view, and you can disagree, the most useful part of QO-100 is to use it as a reliable talkback link covering about 1/3rd to 1/2 half of the earth and to use it to support other radio activities.
EDIT: I see Andrew has posted his QO-100 status since I started waffle writing 
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Is there any activity in CW over the satellite?
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There is some CW activity.
Most activity is SSB and FT8, I am 100% SSB Tx but will take an odd chaser sending CW if they go at a speed I can cope with.
You can listen on the sat using the WEB SDR there are a couple of other WEB SDRs elsewhere in the world.
73 de
Andrew
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is this based on the estimated mission duration of 25 years and launch date of 2018?
Planned life is given as 15 years. It could be longer but the ham transponder is a guest on the commercial satellite so it’s life is a function of actual satellite life or until the commercial operators no longer want the satellite.
As @GM5ALX mentioned, I have the v1 (full duplex) ground station which you can see from the linked blog post I upgraded with parts from dxpatrol.
I bought it as an ‘all in one’ solution after seeing the half-duplex version for sale 2nd hand and weighing up buying all the parts separately (as I didn’t want to go the SDR/Pluto route at that point).
I did build an SDR solution after but am now back to using the ground station as I have it hooked up to my FlexRadio.
Happy to field any questions either on here or via email.
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