Observation 2396103: GRIFEX (40379)

[K3RLD]

Oh, I was mistaken… it had to do with # of decodes and not signal strength on the waterfall. Here’s the thread I was talking about:

Station Demoded Data Az/El Plot with data until 2019-09-18

It’s the combination of distance and angular velocity. The angular velocity determines how long a satellite stays within a certain elevation range. Though the distance is smaller near zenith, the angular velocity is higher, so the satellite spends less time there. At very low elevations more time is spent there, but the distance is too far and hence the SNR to decode is lower.