The Irving Amateur Radio Club, Inc. is developing a tradition of contributing to worthy clubs, organizations, and projects. In that vein we made a significant donation to help underwrite the cross-band repeater system on the International Space System. Below you’ll find the text of a thank you/letter of appreciation from ARISS, the group responsible for the Amateur Radio Station on the International Space Station.

 

You should feel proud to be part of an organization that helps underwrite worthy projects in our community, the outlying counties, and even outer space!

 

If you get a chance, why not try setting a radio to at least monitor the UHF output frequency of the ARISS cross-band radio (notes below), and if you have a radio that supports both bands, why not try and snag a QSO through the ISS?

 

I’m suspect Tom Schuessler would want me to remind you to not forget to set the proper PL tone on the 2m uplink frequency. 

 

Thanks,

 

Hello Tom and Ken,

I hope you are both doing well and staying safe this summer! 

I hope you saw ARRL’s web story, Wednesday, about Astronaut Chris Cassidy, KF5KDR, installing and setting up the new ARISS radio station on the International Space Station! Initial operation of the new radio system is in FM cross-band repeater mode using an uplink of 145.99 MHz (CTCSS 67 Hz) and a downlink of 437.800 MHz. Tens of thousands of hams are having great fun trying out the new radio system! The story is at: 

http://www.arrl.org/news/first-element-of-ariss-next-generation-radio-system-installed-and-operating-on-iss 

The radio system will be utilized for ARISS school voice contacts, too. The first test of that is next week. The team will switch the radio to other modes in coming weeks. Meantime, while we wait for the ARISS-Russia team to recover from Covid problems and get back to work and be able to prepare SSTV images for a future ARISS SSTV session, we are brainstorming about other ways that we might be able to do SSTV.

Please extend an ARISS thank you to your Irving ARC hams who stood with the ARISS volunteers, believing that our team could deliver a fantastic and versatile new ham radio station to the ISS, one that could pass all of NASA’s strict safety testing. The team worked five long years to get here and is quite pleased with the radio system’s performance. 

We have more hardware being developed for 2020 and beyond. If you are inclined to contribute toward this, it would be most welcome. The link is: https://www.ariss.org/donate.html 

Thank you, again — ARISS could not have done this without generous supporters such as Irving Amateur Radio Club!

73, Rosalie K1STO

       ARISS