One of our club members, Stan – N4PMF has logged his first ARISS contacts.
He also extended Holiday Greetings to the world by way of the ISS relay.
Stan's Holiday Message
This may look trivial, and it really is not that difficult – this short text string was encoded into a 1200 baud packet burst on 145.825 MHz with only 5 watts. The beacon packet was heard and retransmitted by the ham radio payload onboard the International Space Station, as it passed overhead at some 17,500 miles per hour, a mere 200 miles above Stan’s house. A ground-based station (K8YSE-3 in this case) heard the packet as relayed by the ISS, and passed it over the internet to the APRS-IS database, and we can see Stan’s location on the map because the beacon also had his Latitude & Longitude embedded. Hams do this all the time, you can see other stations as well.
N4PMF gets on 'The Map'
You can click on the map to go to http://ariss.net, for a current view.
Also shown here is a copy of some of the additional traffic seen during that pass.
some additional packets
There are stations around the world that enjoy making brief contacts this way.
If you have an old TNC, or have tried the newer soundcard modems, try this !
The program that Stan and I use is called UISS, and can be found on the creator’s website http://users.belgacom.net/hamradio/uiss.htm . This makes it really easy – Thanks to Guy – ON6MU for a fun and functional program.
/;^)
