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 Previous: W4EHW Announces Hurricane Season 2002 On-The-Air Test |  Next: Atlantic Division's Ham of the Year Promotes an Idea |
 This group of kids from a local school enjoyed the Archie Ham Radio comic books, provided by ARRL. The League also provided Amateur Radio brochures for distribution during Space Day 2002. |
NEWINGTON, CT, May 6, 2002--AMSAT-NA celebrated Space Day Thursday, May 2, with an exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. The "Build Your Own Satellite!" display attracted a lot of attention. The display showed how radio amateurs build and launch satellites for science and radio communication.
"It was quite an exciting day!" said AMSAT-NA Vice President for Government Liaison Perry Klein, W3PK. "We had a great time exhibiting our microsats and PCSat for Space Day."
Among other
Amateur Radio exhibits, Automatic Position Reporting System (APRS) guru Bob
Bruninga, WB4APR, displayed a "thermal mass model" of PCsat--the low-cost ham
radio/APRS satellite built by midshipmen at the US Naval Academy. "It has resistors
to heat one side to simulate sunlight on that side," Klein explained. "Inside
are thermal sensors at various places to measure the effect of heating." He
said Bruninga set up a laptop on Space Day that displayed the telemetry signals
from the thermal sensors.
 AMSAT-NA Board Member Tom Clark, W3IWI (third from left), chats with former US Sen John Glenn--one of the original seven US astronauts--as Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (left), and Tom Miller, K4IC, look on. In the foreground are the PCsat model (left) and the Microsat model. |
Bruninga also assembled the one-meter dish he designed from standard hardware-store parts to receive the AO-40 satellite's 2.4 GHz downlink signal.
Mark Kanawati, N4TPY, displayed a model of the AMSAT-OSCAR-E satellite that's under development. The microminiaturized components were a hit with the youngsters. Plans call for the "OSCAR-Echo" satellite to contain analog and digital VHF/UHF FM transponders similar to those carried on the UO-14 and AO-27 satellites now in orbit. Kanawati, who was project manager for AO-27, is heading up this latest venture.
 Curator of Aerospace Electronics and Computing at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Paul Ceruzzi (left)--a former ham--with Bob Bruninga, WB4APR, and his one-meter dish. |
Klein said the AMSAT display included a model from the Microsat Project of the early 1990s which resulted in the launching of PACSAT (AO-16), DOVE (DO-17 ); WEBERSAT (WO-18) and LUSAT (LO-19). "We had the original engineering test model of Microsat, and we showed photos of students working on satellites and talking with astronauts on the space shuttle," Klein said. "The younger kids went for the Archie comic books."
Among those on hand were AMSAT-NA Board members Tom Clark, W3IWI, and Dick Daniels, W4PUJ, and AMSAT-NA Treasurer Art Feller, W4ART. Don Sylvain, WA3WOD, of the Smithsonian Amateur Radio Club (NN3SI) also assisted.
"We got to talk with Sen John Glenn, Gen Jack Dailey--the museum director--and the curators from the Air and Space and American History museums," Klein noted.
For more
information on AMSAT, visit the AMSAT-NA
Web site.
| Previous: W4EHW Announces Hurricane Season 2002 On-The-Air Test | Next: Atlantic Division's Ham of the Year Promotes an Idea |
