Yesterday my little 2 meter rig showed up and I am looking forward to another adventure in ham radio. I want to communicate with the International Space Station.
Everyone with the exception of a couple of other hams I have talked to goes completely aghast. The most common thing I hear is, "You can't do that! Those are special military frequencies!"
Well, guess what? You can and it is 100% legal and to a certain extent it is encouraged.
Most of the astronauts have ham licenses from either the FCC or their respective countries and there are a couple of 2 meter rigs in the ISS just for astronaut use.
There really isn't a whole lot to do while you are off-watch on the ISS. You can't just climb into a space suit and spacewalk over to the Kit-Kat club for a beer and a lap dance. Hookers and bllow are in short supply in space so for entertainment a lot of the guys tinker with the 2 meter rig and field calls from earth.
I imagine NASA encourages this, too for PR reasons. It gets us earthlings involved with the ISS and I suppose they also learn a few things from it.
Anyway, this is my next project.
I am what hams would call an HF guy in that I simply use a basic rig in the 2-30 Mhz range and communicate long distances using various skywave and groundwave methods. The signals in this particular band will bounce off of the earth and the ionosphere.
Two meter is a bit different in that it is pretty much line of sight as the signals do not readily bounce very well on a regular basis.
I am going to have to pick a time when the ISS is above the horizon.
I am also going to have to learn to use the 2 meter rig and it is far more complex than the standard HF rig I have been using. My PRC 320 is a simple, straightforward no frills rig designed to be used by soldiers. The 2 meter rigs seem to be chock full of complicated features and programs. There is also a different protocol in using them.
Much VHF communication is done by repeaters, which is a whole new thing to me.
Anyway, the neat thing about my plans to communicate with the ISS is that I can shoot my signal to them direct and not have to involve repeaters and things of that nature, It's pretty straightforward.
I am sixty years of age and unlike a lot of younger people I remember the beginnings of the space program and the excitement that went with it.
Incidentally, the guys that made Project Mercury work did so without the use of computers. No calculators, either. Just a bunch of guys with pencils, papers and things called slide rules. The latter is a tool which I doubt there are more than eleven people under the age of fifty that know how to use.
The calculator that I bought the other day for two bucks would have started a fight of epic proportions among the engineers, each fighting for the use of it! Yes, it was that primitive.
There were a couple of Italian guys that were busy during these fledgling flights that were monitoring both the American and the Soviet space programs using a bunch of surplus things they had put together, including a special antenna.
Most people never heard about them but they fascinated me, but because they were not picked up by the media I learned little about them except that they had some sort of evidence that one or more early Soviet astronauts died in space.
Apparently the Russian program was a lot riskier than ours was.
Anyway, these Italian guys did something and I'd just bet their recieving equipment was about the size of a two-car garage and the vacuum tube technology made an industrial electric meter spin like a top when they fired the unit up.
Nowadays under $150 buys a rig that can not only listen to astronauts, but it can actually talk to them and it used about as much electricity as two or three light bulbs. Incrediible!
That's pretty cool if you ask me.
Anyway, this is not going to happen inside the next few days as I have to go back to work soon and when I get back I have to set this rig up.
I'll keep you posted.
my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment