A few months back, I purchased an Arrow II satellite antenna so that I can get better results when the International Space Station has their SSTV events. There are usually only a handful of events each year, and I’ve missed most of them since the first one I participated in back in February 2019.
The station has its own APRS setup, so I decided one night to see if I could ping it with my equipment. I used APRSDroid on my phone and linked to one of my UV-5R radios. All that needed to be done was to change the APRS digi path in the app preferences menu to ARISS and set the frequency on the radio to 145.825 MHz. All I could do then was to eagerly wait for the next pass of the station overhead.
SUCCESS!
The following image shows the contact. Only 1 packet made it through, though I had made several attempts during the pass. The packet was digipeated back to Earth through KE8FZT. This was a fun experiment and I look forward to attempting it again with my big old tripod I dug out of storage a few weeks back. Should make things a bit easier going forward.
Note: Yep, don’t start a post while you’re falling asleep. It’ll end up sitting as a draft for a few months if you do.
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