[GCARC] Field Day QSO with NA1SS

[John Zaruba]

Congratulations on a job well done!

73,

John K2ZA

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jun 26, 2022, at 15:06, Jon Pearce <jon at pearcefamily.org> wrote:
> 
> Today N3PUU, K2QA and I were in the Field Day satellite tent and decided to listen to the downlink on the FM repeater on the International Space Station. We knew that it would be jammed and didn’t plan to try to make a contact but thought the pileup would be interesting, To our surprise we heard NA1SS operating on the downlink – that’s a space station astronaut talking directly on the downlink. We didn’t get a contact on that pass but I tried on the next pass and was successful. I extracted the audio clip from the SDR IQ stream and it’s linked bellow. It’s probably the most memorable QSO I’ve had in 58 years of ham radio. Looks like live ISS operation was planned and announced but at least one operator was extremely surprised at the beginning of the pass after asking the station “Your callsign please” and having the response be “NA1SS”.His Field Day response was “1A DX”  - uh, yeah, I guess the space station counts as “DX”. Good thing the Field Day rules don’t require a specific geographic location for operators in space!
> 
> I think what made it finally work was that there’s Doppler shift on all satellite passes and I had the transmitter set to automatically follow that shift. By the end of the orbit the Doppler correction was 3 khz, for which I doubt that other stations had corrected, and they were therefore probably transmitting outside of the repeater input frequency. That’s probably why I got thru at the end of the pass while not being successful earlier.
> 
> Here’s hoping that they’ll send a nice NA1SS QSL card to W2MMD, which will join a small group (including Chris KC2IEB) to have actually worked an astronaut in space!
> 
> 73 de Jon WB2MNF
> 
> https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aok5NmGzzrC8jByCeqMiJaK1VwLS?e=f9CAzR
> 
> 
> 
> 
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