Space Station live via ham radio!  The event began at 8:39 AM local time and lasted about 10 minutes.  The contact was made at the request of Dr. Gregory Errol Chamitoff Ph.D. (KD5PKZ) an astronaut currently stationed on the ISS.  Dr. Chamitoff is an alum of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and is friends with assistant scout master John Schlesselmann.  Several folks, including local hams and staff of the UC Santa Barbara physics department organized the event (see below).

The scouts submitted question advance, and most of them had the opportunity to ask the questions of the astronaut.  Transmission quality with perfect, and the contact took place in a prominent location on campus (the patio on the roof of Broida Hall). Members of SBARC also worked with the kids to achieve scout "radio merit badges" after the event.  More than 100 people attended the event.

This was also a big media event, and it was a great opportunity to set up the SBARC communications van and spend the day promoting the club and amateur radio. Three television stations covered the event, as did several print and radio reporters.  The contact was also streamed live on the internet, and was seen worldwide.

THE RADIO EQUIPMENT:

There were two, two-meter FM ham stations capable of space communications (see the block diagram below) used for this event. The primary station had full tracking capability (azimuth & elevation rotors, tracking software and interface) a circularly polarized beam, pre-amps and a power amplifier. The backup station only needed to have an omni-directional antenna, but it also had a pre-amp and power amp.

We used two Yaesu ft-847s radios, a Gulf Alpha 2 Meter 5x5 circular polarized yagi, controlled by a Yaesu G-5500 elevation/azimuth rotor, a Dell laptop computer running SatPC32 tracking software.