Tag: Satellite

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International Space Station SSTV Status

There haven’t been any SSTV events from the ISS recently, this being due to new laptops being deployed to the station and the Russian segment (where the gear used for SSTV transmissions is located) not having a proper interface for connecting the radio to the newer computers.

This issue was noted on the ARISS website on December 22, 2022. There’s usually a bunch of Russian SSTV events (usually planned around times when the station is primarily over Russia, unfortunate but understandable) and to a lesser extent some standard SSTV events around the holidays and earlier in the year.

All that being said, the radios on the station are still available for other uses. The radio located in the Columbus module is in a crossband repeater configuration (of which I was completely unaware of until a few weeks ago) and the radio onboard the Service module (likely the Russian module mentioned earlier) is configured for packet data.

I was able to send some APRS packets to the station on December 30, 2022 and they were picked up by VE2UAL-2 in Quebec and K4KDR-15 in Virginia.

The station is usually in the sky for around 10ish minutes during a really good pass, likely that this 800+km APRS contact could also be duplicated using the crossband repeater

I’ll need to do a check for the best ISS passes for next weekend as I’ll be winter camping and will have plenty of time to mess around with the radios. I’ll definitely be testing out the crossband repeater functionality.

If you go here, you can check out the status of the onboard radios. This also includes info on planned shutdowns for docking/undocking procedures with supply ships and what-not.

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First Satellite Contact

I made my first satellite contact during a pass of the AO-27 satellite (EYESAT-1) on December 29, 2021. This was my first attempt at satellite work and was marginally successful. I could hear the traffic on the satellite and was able to hear and be heard by another station (N2FYA), although I did have issues on my end with properly receiving. The audio was very hit or miss which could be from me not being able to match my satellite antenna with the satellites antenna polarity (they do tumble through space), but I believe is mainly from my connection from the radio to my earbuds.

I had my Wouxun KG-UVD1P hooked up as my receive radio mounted to the antenna boom feeding my Olympus voice recorder with a 2.5mm to 3.5mm aux. cable which then had a set of earbuds attached. I’m thinking that the aux. cable being near some of the antenna elements may have allowed RF interference to affect the received signal. I have since added some ferrite beads to the aux. cable in the hopes of reducing any RFI in the future.

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ARISS Series 19 Lunar Exploration SSTV Event

The International Space Station held another SSTV event during the Winter 2021 break and I was determined to catch all of the images that they would broadcast this time around. They were to be all related to lunar exploration, past, present and future. I had dabbled with receiving SSTV images from the ISS previously, but never really planned for it properly. I did my research and found that all the suitable passes for this event were all early morning passes for each day (ranging from 1 AM to 9 AM).

Armed with my trusty Arrow II satellite antenna, a radio and my smartphone, I headed out morning after morning to collect the 12 images that would be broadcast.

Out of those 12 images, I managed to snag 10 (I missed images 10 & 11). Much better than my two prior attempts and the quality of the images was much better as well. The Arrow II was definitely worth the investment. If you go here you can type my callsign into the search box (see the image on the Amateur Radio page for my callsign) to see all of the images I captured.

Happy Holidays from the ISS Crew
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ISS Contact

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.

Screencap shows the default ISS position out near the west coast of Africa (it’s always there). It was almost directly overhead when the contact was made.

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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20 Years of ARISS SSTV Event

Back in December there was an SSTV event to celebrate 20 years of amateur radio operations on the International Space Station. I was able to catch part of an image from a fairly good pass, but abruptly lost the signal.

Since then I have purchased an Arrow II Satellite Antenna. Should be getting better results next time.