ShackDeck
Sign in
Download Free Now
What to listen to · QO-100: the Es’hail-2 satellite
QO-100: the lower CW beacon on 10489.500 MHz, the bottom edge of the transponder
The Morse beacon at the lower edge of the QO-100 transponder, sent up from the AMSAT-DL ground station in Bochum: an endless CW text that marks where the band begins and gives everyone a frequency and level reference.
What you hear
A single clean Morse signal that never pauses for long: a looping text with the AMSAT-DL identification and short notices, sent at a comfortable speed, on exactly 10489.500 MHz. Below it there is nothing, because this is where the transponder described in the main article begins; above it, within a few kilohertz, the CW contacts start. Through a geostationary path the tone is perfectly steady, which makes it the easiest Morse to read on the whole satellite.
Who transmits and why
The beacon is generated at AMSAT-DL's ground station in Bochum, Germany, and sent up on 2.4 GHz like any other signal; the satellite relays it down. It exists so that every station can calibrate its receiver, since a Ku-band LNB drifts by kilohertz with the temperature, and so that everyone has a known signal to compare their own against: a signal louder than the beacons is too loud. The matching beacon at the upper edge sits 500 kHz higher, at 10490.000 MHz.
When and where to listen
Always, from any receiver with a dish on the satellite. If the beacon is missing, the receiver's dish or converter is the problem, not the satellite.
In ShackDeck
Station catalogue → QO-100: the Es’hail-2 satellite → QO-100: the lower CW beacon 10489.500. The program picks a public receiver with a dish on the satellite, does the converter arithmetic, sets CW with a passband of 300 to 900 Hz and shows the waterfall with the beacon as a bright dotted line. No dish, receiver or account of your own is needed.