[CTSARA] Hit The International Space Station

[jon.perelstein at gmail.com]

I went over to Frank's house (KB1IFX) to work on some things with him and  
while I was there, his Orbitron program showed that the International Space  
Station was coming in range, so we tried a 2 meter (145.825Mhz) FM packet  
contact -- AND SUCCEEDED. We connected up with the Russian side of the  
station (RS0ISS). We were busy composing a message to be left on their BBS  
when it went out of range and we lost contact (at present, the ISS is above  
the horizon here in SW CT for only about 10 minutes per pass -- although  
that will change over time).


And now the really interesting part -- Frank was using a Radio Shack  
discone antenna mounted on the top of his house. Apparently, discones,  
J-Poles, ground planes, and plain old verticals do just fine in talking  
with the ISS and with many of the ham-accessible satellites. All the really  
good yagis and specialty satellite antennas make it easier to hit them, but  
they aren'ta requirement.


Frank's rig is a standard Yaesu FT-1900 (2 meter FM transceiver) with a  
standard Kantronics TNC along with a simple terminal communications program  
similar to Hyperterm for the packet end. If you have the capability for  
packet with a TNC or with a RIGblaster/Signalink and AGWPE, that's all you  
need.


Orbitron (http://www.stoff.pl/) is a freeware program predicts the track of  
pretty every satellite up there based on published data adjusted by regular  
sightings that are downloaded every so often to the program. It can predict  
out days, weeks, months. For example, we ran a prediction on a couple of  
the amateur satellites for this year's Field Day for Terry to use. While I  
was there, we compared Orbitron's projected track for the ISS with what  
NASA television is showing as the actual track, and Orbitron was spot on.

By the way, some of the amateur satellites include 10 meter PSK and voice  
capabilities.

73s
Jon
KB1QBZ

PS Frank now has Pierre's Winlink station operating on 145.030.