Attachment 1
First Artificial Earth Satellite – Sputnik

by
Cyril Vahtrick

News of Sputnik’s launch came on the Saturday of the October Long Weekend in 1957 and one detail of the announcement caused some OTC people to prick up their ears – Sputnik would be transmitting signals at just over 20 MHz (also 40 MHz). It’s amazing to realize that this was over 50 years ago!

Graham Gosewinckel, then an engineer at OTC’s international receiving station at Bringelly NSW immediately began to search for the signals and was able to pick them up with a sensitive HF receiver, coupled with suitably chosen rhombic aerials. The satellite’s orbital period (96 minutes) entailed some dexterity in keeping track of the signals during the relatively short period when the satellite was over our part of the globe. Graham informed Chief Engineer Bob Long of his discovery and all other OTC receiving stations were alerted including Rockbank Vic. and the Coast radio Station in Hobart which quickly picked up signals and, by comparing signal strengths and times, a pretty good idea of the satellite’s orbital period was obtained.

Bob was discussing with Cyril Vahtrick the fact that observations indicated that each succeeding satellite orbit seemed to have precessed by some 20 degrees or more westward. Then suddenly it dawned on us – we were of course communicating with an extraterrestrial object – our world was rotating under the orbit of this object. A brief calculation showed that the earth was rotating precisely 24 degrees eastwards per each 96 minute satellite orbit. This meant that the satellite returned to the same relative position over us every fifteenth orbit.

On the second day, Hobart Radio telephoned Bob and reported not only signals from the satellite at the predicted time but also an actual sighting of the satellite in the evening sky. Since this was the first reported sighting in the world that we were aware of, it became of considerable interest to the whole country. With our by now fairly accurate calculations of the satellite’s orbital path (about a 65 degree angle to the Equator) Bob Long decided to contact the news media and forecast that the satellite would be arriving at a precise time in the early evening and that it might be seen in the south western sky over Sydney at that time.

This prediction proved to be accurate and a large number of Sydney people were able to observe the satellite in the sky. As all this happened over the long weekend, there appeared to be nobody available in Government departments or the military to comment on this newsworthy event. As a consequence, it seemed as if the whole media world descended on OTC for information. In fact the normal OTC business seemed almost to come to a standstill for a day or so during the height of interest in Sputnik. We were besieged by calls and as people reported satellite or UFO sightings all over the place, Cyril Vahtrick and Ron Knightley rigged up an orbital indicator on an office globe, with a slide representing Sputnik. By rotating the globe from a known time reference and moving the slide on its fixed orbit we had a reasonably good slide rule which could tell us where Sputnik was at any time.

There was one telephone call where a country newspaper reporter had heard that a “flaming object” had plummeted to the ground near a town in western N.S.W. Bob asked him what time this had happened and, with a quick flick of our makeshift orbital calculator Bob solemnly announced that, at that time, Sputnik would have been over Afghanistan!

Graham Gosewinckel made many recordings of the bleep, bleep, bleep, coded signals transmitted by Sputnik, quite unintelligible to us of course, but naturally the media wanted recordings to broadcast to the public. One amusing phone call we received was from somebody who declared that he could distinctly hear the Sputnik sounds emanating from his bed springs!

On the serious side, we attempted to use the satellite to perform some 20MHz ionospheric propagation tests and to have a general look at our rhombic aerial radiation patterns, but it was difficult to set up other than qualitative tests. OTC’s involvement in satellites temporarily receded after Sputnik, with pressures from the real world of HF radio and the exciting prospect of submarine telephone cables which were now on the drawing board.