ARISS 20th Celebration

Amateur radio has been on the International Space Station for 20 years now. 

Since we live in an apartment, putting up antennas isn't an option. But there are ways to listen to stuff so when this hit the news, I decided to try to listen to the broadcasting of pictures via slow scan television mode directly from the Space Station. I run Linux on the computer and had no luck finding an SSTV decoder program. This led to downloading WINE (a windows emulator) so that I could run an older SSTV program named MMSSTV. Then, I tried it by running videos from Youtube and it worked really well. 

At the time of the special event transmissions, the Space Station passes over Spokane, WA were all in the middle of the night. So my sleep on Friday and Saturday night (July 21 & 22, 2017) was all chopped up. But it was successful and here are the usable pictures that I received. The method used was "audio coupling" between my Kenwood HT and a dictaphone app on my iPhone. This way, there was an audio file of the pass and it could be decoded later with the computer.

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Technical notes for next time: 

1. The audio from the scanner is noticeably different from the HT and doesn't work nearly as well.

2. Even though the Space Station is pretty stable, circularly polarized antennas are still needed. Using the J-pole with the radiation portion being slowly bent at a 90 degree angle did seem to help. 

3. Squelch breaks don't work. There is still enough the the signal coming through that the decoding program tends not to get lost and try to restart the picture. Even worse, the signal needs to be resynced. 

4. Pictures below of an antenna arrangement to try. But use two 2M J-poles at right angles and two 440 Mhz J-poles at right angles, making an X look. This would be an transmit / receive set-up for working satellites. 

This picture, while it shows the scanner, is how I hooked up both headphones and a line to the computer. The computer side of the audio is hooked to the modified cable (the modified end is connected to the radio end) which is hooked into the red side of the USB music fairy. Then go into the computer sound settings and choose the music fairy as the device to get audio from.