Contact the ISS

https://www.ariss.org/contact-the-iss.html

by logikblok • 7 months ago

117 30 7 months ago

fevercell• 7 months ago

When I was studying to get my Technician-class ham radio license a few weeks ago I was slightly curious as to why there were questions relating to space stations and satellites, like "any ametaur with a radio license can contact the ISS" and such, but I paid those thoughts no mind as I was being hasty trying to legally fiddle with my APRS tracker in a weather balloon.

I should re-review those exam questions; I might be licensed to do a lot more than I know I can.

burnt-resistor• 7 months ago

Can't ham radio operators also be drafted involuntarily in times of disaster and war? Incidentally, America suspended all amateur radio operations during WWII.

maxbond3• 7 months ago

Ham operators are understood to have a role in coordinating disaster communications but it's on a voluntary basis. They're no more or less subject to being drafted than anyone else. Your name and address does end up in a public database, however. (I'm talking about the United States. I have no idea about anywhere else.)

eru2• 7 months ago

Can't ham radio operators also be drafted involuntarily in times of disaster and war?

Approximately anyone can.

benchly• 7 months ago

Just to clarify, no, we cannot be involuntarily drafted because we are amateur radio operators. However, should we be drafted in time of need, our experience in radio does help direct the likely path we would end up taking.

You also bring up an interesting time in ham radio history that a lot of newer hams are largely unaware of; WWII. Amateur radio thrives on communication globally, so anyone from the US could talk to anyone from any other country. The need for restrictions of the bands became obvious in the years leading up to the US entering the war, with various countries that were once accessible by radio going dark. The US logically followed suit, but operators were still monitoring.

There's a great article on this time in amateur radio history here; https://bw.billl.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Radio-Histor...

HelloUsername• 7 months ago

Related discussion in 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16375474

wortelefant• 7 months ago

I wonder what kind of messages they'll receive on the ISS - "Excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ"?

creatonez• 7 months ago

I'm surprised they haven't been spammed by flat earthers & moon landing deniers so much that they have to stop picking up the radio.

Possibly explained by moon landing deniers being too stupid to operate radio equipment.

exitnode4• 7 months ago

Last October, I had the honor of making such contact with the ISS. I posted about this on my website here: https://rz01.org/na1ss/

The ISS has radios on board that allow amateur radio operators to send and receive APRS messages, talk to other hams via their built-in FM repeater or to receive SSTV images. They also have amateur TV stuff on board but I have not explored this yet. Crew members with an amateur radio license can pick up the mic of the radio that acts as a FM repeater to make contacts with other hams on the earth.

You can contact the ISS via a handheld setup (FM radio and a yagi antenna in your hand) or with a stationary setup like mine: https://rz01.org/leo-sat-ground-station-v3/

exitnode4• 7 months ago

If you are interested in amateur radio in general, you might enjoy reading my "Declaration of Love to Amateur Radio": https://rz01.org/a-declaration-of-love-to-amateur-radio/

ErroneousBosh2• 7 months ago

You can contact the ISS via a handheld setup (FM radio and a yagi antenna in your hand) or with a stationary setup like mine: https://rz01.org/leo-sat-ground-station-v3/

A good few years ago I had a crack as using the ISS's crossband repeater when it was on and could hear myself clearly with a Kenwood TH-F7E and home-made dual-band crossed dipole.

Unfortunately no-one else could work me, because they'd boosted the satellite's orbit, the TLEs hadn't been updated, and so everyone with a nice motorised antenna positioner was aiming at the wrong part of the sky.

Me standing in my back garden pointing roughly in the direction of the fast-moving bright spot? Nah that worked perfectly :-D

exitnode4• 7 months ago

Nice! I made my first LEO sat contact also in the garden with an arrow yagi and a cheap HT. It was fun but I prefer operating the easy way and building a nice station. Some neighbours watched me making this first contact and they now speak to me differently...

GistNoesis• 7 months ago

Or use lasers : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCQ2CbfGs6g&t=440s

ssernikk• 7 months ago

Lasers in space are fun! We[1] are actually doing this for real but automated and inversed -- launching a satellite with a laser to beam data down to Earth. Like these searchlights, but from orbit!

[1] A bunch of students at https://satlab.agh.edu.pl

jeffwass2• 7 months ago

My daughter is deaf and goes to a specialist deaf secondary school in the UK.

Five years ago ARISS-UK pre-arranged a connection between the school and astronaut Mark Vande Hei on one of the ISS flyovers. Various students got to ask questions directly to Mark in orbit. It was the first contact between ISS and a deaf school.

https://www.arrl.org/news/ariss-confirms-october-12-as-date-...

rafram• 7 months ago

An “aural” deaf school? This seems like a fairly harmful approach. I know that approaches to deaf education are quite fraught, but pushing students to communicate orally and not allowing sign language in the classroom seems like it’ll set a lot of students back educationally. It essentially turns deafness into a learning disability, which it doesn’t need to be if you just allow sign language. (It also shuts the students out of mainstream Deaf culture, which I imagine a lot of them will resent later in life.) I am surprised that a school with this philosophy still exists, frankly.

jeffwass2• 7 months ago

They’ve been doing this for over a century, it’s probably the top deaf school in the UK, and has the support of nearly the entire deaf community.

Most of the students have either some degree of hearing or use cochlear implants. I think nearly all, if not all, students use either hearing aids or cochlear implants.

The classes are very small (eg 5-6 max usually), students are arranged in a U-shape around the teacher so they can read lips. And there’s a special wireless broadcast system so the teacher wears a microphone and sends the audio directly to hearing aids or cochlear implants.

Regarding deaf culture, most of the students use BSL on their own outside class, and my daughter learned BSL from her friends there that grew up with it. Coming from a mainstream primary, she found “her people” here, discovered deaf culture and a community that shares the same struggles she faces.

The idea is that by teaching in BSL the students are further restricted in their ability to function in a hearing society.

I’m curious if you are deaf yourself, or work with the deaf. All the teachers at the school are trained teachers of the deaf, some are even deaf themselves. And I haven’t heard any complaints about the aural nature of the learning (except from the reservations of a few parents before sending their kids there, and I don’t think any of these parents regrets this after their children started there.)

nephihaha• 7 months ago

Donaldsons?

firesteelrain• 7 months ago

I have used the APRS on the ISS to talk with other amateur radio operators. I also spoke to an astronaut briefly from my backyard using a Kenwood D72A and an Elk antenna.

olyjohn• 7 months ago

That's cool! Something I want to do some day!

The closest I have done is picking up the SSTV signals with one of my HTs. I learned a lot doing it. It was crazy just how directional the rubber ducky antenna was even on a crappy Baofeng. Turning the radio 90 degrees went from 0 signal to crystal clear signal. I thought it was cool, and even my mom was impressed. Lol

ErroneousBosh2• 7 months ago

About 17 years ago I recorded Richard Garriott's side of a conversation with a school in Warwick in England. The school was several hundred miles south, so well out of radio range, but obviously it's a clear path the thousand miles or so to the ISS!

https://gjcp.net/mp3s/iss-friday1106.mp3

There's a video somewhere on Youtube with another recording from Hampshire, just a short distance south of the school but still too far too hear them. It's crazy hearing the two different recordings of the same thing :-)

cweagans• 7 months ago

I've done this twice for local schools. It was an event for the entire school to listen in on. In one case, we relayed the signal from the roof of the school to another local ham's house, where he had a big antenna on a tower with alt/az control for tracking the station. That meant we could test the tracking beforehand and not worry about setting it up again at the school.

NASA also used to coordinate telephone-based contact (maybe they still do? not sure). They'd simply patch the phone call in to radio equipment that they acquired and operated for this purpose. Confirmed beforehand out of personal interest though: it was still over the ham bands.

Something really amazing happens when kids are given an opportunity to experience something like that: science goes from being a largely theoretical exercise to having some amount of practical applicability. The kids that got to actually _talk_ on the radio were incredibly curious and eager to learn as much as they could about everything. They wanted to know how radio works. They wanted to know more about orbital mechanics and how we know where to point the antenna (to the point of actually _asking_ to learn the math). They wanted to know how big the ISS was and how we even got it to orbit (which led to some model rocketry-related topics).

I imagine that it was very difficult to justify the expense of acquiring and transporting heavy amateur radio equipment to the space station (even if you're just thinking about the cost of putting the equipment into orbit - the cost is (pardon the pun) astronomical), but this kind of stuff _matters_. Making science accessible to children in a way that isn't just preparing them for the next standardized test _matters_.

NoiseBert69• 7 months ago

I've - sadly - seen different things in Germany a few times.

Lots of students have basically zero interest in that stuff. With the exception of the usual group of nerds.

Radio call at a school with an Arctic research station? The organizers from our local club even begged members to come.

Contact the ISS

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