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 Previous: Amateur Radio In and Around the XVII LA Marathon |  Next: ARRL In Action: What Have We Been Up To Lately? |
 Expedition 4 Commander Yury Onufrienko, RK3DUO. He conducted his first ARISS school contact February 28 using the RS0ISS call sign. [NASA Photo] |
NEWINGTON, CT, Feb 28, 2002--International Space Station Commander Yury Onufrienko, RK3DUO, this week chatted via Amateur Radio with students in Russia. The Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact with Kursk Technical University took place at 0922 UTC February 28. It marked only the second ARISS QSO with a Russian school, and the first for Onufrienko. Using the RS0ISS call sign, Onufrienko spent the 10-minute pass answering questions in Russian from five students at RW3WWW, the club station at the school, located some 250 miles south of Moscow.
"The students were very excited and happy to talk to Yury," said club director Valery Pikkiev, RW3WW. Assisted by his son Dimitry, RA3WPS, Pikkiev battled reception problems that may have resulted from blocking of the space station's amateur antenna. The same problem was reported by an Italian listener, Andrea Bonaiuto, IT9GSV.
Despite the difficulties, the contact was considered a success by the students and a crowd of about 25 observers and reporters. The Kursk event was the 47th ARISS school contact since the first crew came aboard the ISS in November 2000.
Last July 4, US astronaut Susan Helms,
KC7NHZ, took to the air as RS0ISS to speak with students at the Petersburg
Junior Technical Center's club station, RZ1AWO. That QSO marked the first ARISS
European school contact.
The antennas at RW3WWW. [Photo courtesy of Valery Pikkiev, RW3WW]
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The all-ham Expedition 4 crew of Onufrienko,
Carl Walz, KC5TIE, and Dan Bursch, KD5PNU, has been able to devote only limited
time to ARISS school contacts during its duty tour. Three spacewalks during the
crew's tour--two of them including the installation of new Amateur Radio
antennas on the ISS Service Module--have eaten into time that might otherwise
have been available for such activities. Each one-day spacewalk has involved
the entire crew for more than five days. Plans had called for an average of one
scheduled school contact per week, but crew members' free time continues to be
at a premium--with a Progress rocket docking set for late March, and space
shuttle and Soyuz taxi missions in April. The crew is due to return to Earth in
mid-May.
Students at Kursk Technical University's club station RW3WWW, speak with ISS Expedition 4 Crew Commander Yury Onufrienko, operating the space station as RS0ISS. [Photo courtesy of Valery Pikkiev, RW3WW] |
The ARISS operations team has been hoping to arrange contacts during 2002 for each of the more than 40 schools now on the waiting list. On the tentative ARISS school QSO schedule are contacts with Deep Creek Elementary School in Oregon and Harrogate Ladies College in the UK next week. A contact with the Peter Anich Oberschule fuer Geometer in Italy has been rescheduled for mid-March. Also on the long list are schools in New York, Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas, as well as schools in Australia (Tasmania) and France.
In other ARISS news, the Expedition 4 crew installed a new packet TNC last weekend. The packet system now is operational for the first time with a call sign--RS0ISS. The ARISS packet uplink is 145.99 MHz; the downlink is 145.80 MHz. Amateurs are asked not to leave messages for the crew, as no computer is attached to the system, and the crew has little time to respond to messages.
ARISS is an international project of AMSAT,
ARRL and NASA.--Gene Chapline, K5YFL, provided information on the Kursk contact for
this report
| Previous: Amateur Radio In and Around the XVII LA Marathon | Next: ARRL In Action: What Have We Been Up To Lately? |
