ISS International Space Station APRS Information Page

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Updated August 29, 2001

NO Packet Signals from International Space Station After New TNC arrived onboard.
August 22, 2001

The iss crew is very busy, unpacking new supplies and packing up trash.
The Expedition Three crew of the space station consists of astronaut commander Frank Culbertson, Cosmonaut Vladimir Dezhurov, Cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin (his first space mission). When I asked Moscow about this crews experience with Amateur radio activities, I was told that Mikhail is a very experienced amateur radio operator and we should expect to hear from him during this mission.

Try to visualize your spouse coming home last week with 5 mini vans full of supplies, the Shuttle (with the back seats removed).
Then your spouse came home again this week with another 5 mini vans full of supplies too (Progress cargo truck).
Your house is a typical 4 bed room house (no basement). And it is now your job, your spouses job and your sons job to properly unload all of the groceries and put them away before they spoil.
And some where in one of those bags is your new ham radio TNC. We'll of course your spouse says food first, hobbies later.

To make it more complex, your pantry is full and you have to stuff the supplies into the dining room, bed rooms, living rooms, etc.
And you need to find a place for all of the packing material. You just cant toss the trash bags out side for the recycle truck. You must put the trash back into the 5 mini vans (after they are empty)

So the iss crew has temporally more important things to do than play radio. I am sure that when the important work is done, the amateur radio experiments will be reactivated.
73 Miles www.marex-na.org

Finally after 5 months ISS International Space Station ALPHA is active in Packet Radio.
The cause of this long time was due to a failure to the Tnc's battery backup and the result was a reset to the default parameters. 1st Crew was unable to fix this fault because of a very busy time working to prepare the new International Space Station.
Now ARISS Team after a few test decided to open operation in packet radio from ISS even if tnc's callsign is NOCALL.
Fortunately default parameters have Digipeat ON after a reset and in this way we can operate ISS as a digipeater.
Please do not connect NOCALL and it is a good rule do not attempt a connection to any other station because this only adds QRM to the channel.
A better idea is to use ISS as an APRS Digipeater and I am testing this mode since April 9. If you use a program like UI-View or WinAPRS, you can see other stations using APRS correctly positioned on your map.

No Signals received from Space Station
April 19, 2001

On April 18, 2nd Crew onboard ISS performed a Soyuz flight.
Freighter was Soyuz TM-31 redocked to the Zvezda axial docking port after Progress M-44 departure on April 16, 2001.

The schedule for the re-docking of the S-TM31 was:
Closure of the exit hatch: 0815UTC
Separation of the ship: 1237UTC
Soft mate at Zvezda: 1300UTC
Opening of the exit hatch: approx. 1600UTC.

The operation was successfully executed.
The re-docking was needed to enable Endeavour to dock at the American laboratory module Destiny and to park over there the Italian cargo module Raffaello.
The launch of Endeavour is scheduled for tomorrow 19.04.2001 at 1841UTC.

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Frank Bauer, KA3HDO ARISS Chairman *April 14, 2001* ISS Enthusiasts: It was six days ago when I sent out the e-mail stating that the ISS Packet System was turned on with NOCALL. Since then, I have gotten a FLOOD of e-mails. I am glad to see the interest and excitement in the ISS Amateur Radio system. A number of you are asking really good questions on the reflector. For those who do not know, we have a really great international Web page for ARISS with lots of good information on it. The ARISS web page is located at: http://ariss.gsfc.nasa.gov/		Bob Bruninga, WB4APR April 14, 2001 To help explain just how APRS fits into the UI packet Experiment going on on ISS, I have prepared a little FAQ page which I hope will help.
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Bob Bruninga, WB4APR April 14, 2001 BIG DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ISS and TERRESTRIAL PACKET de WB4APR Regarding performance of your ISS packet station on an OMNI antenna, there are many factors that make this totally different from Terrestrial packet and why many plug-n-play packet set ups will not work well with ISS: RANGE: ISS is from 400 to 2000km away at ALL times. 1) Everyone, everywhere gets the same "best" signal (within 10 dB) 2) There will be fades much greater, but no one does any better 3) Conversly, each station on your local BBS, gets orders of magnitude different signals (30 to 60dB, thats 1000 to 1,000,000 times stronger) depending on where they live... Ranges are 1 to 100 miles...		Miles Mann, WF1F April 12, 2001 The Minimum ERP needed to acces ISS packet will vary between 0.1 watt ERP to 1,000,000 ERP depending on how many stations are transmitting at that time. You signal needs to be (all values are approximate) 3-6 db greater than the noise level at the receiver. The receiver on ISS has a hearing range of 1500 miles, in ALL directions.
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Bob Bruninga, WB4APR April 9, 2001 ISS is now digipeating packets via the UNPROTO call of NOCALL. I just did it at about 2225z over the east coast of the USA. There will be many more passes tonight! Uplink is 145.99 and downlink is 145.80. Here is how to operate via ISS! 1) Do not attempt a connection to any other station. It is a fruitless exercise and only adds QRM to a very busy channel. 2) ANY TNC: Set UNPROTO to CQ VIA NOCALL. Then go to converse, and TYPE greetings or messages to others that you see on the downlink... If you see your packet digipeated via NOCALL, so did everyone else...		Dr Dave Larsen (MIREX) April 9, 2001 "NOCALL" is the Keyboard port - not the "PMS" - and also is the default for the digi. On some TNC's NOCALL is filtered out so watch your TNC prams. There should be NO problems with APRS useing NOCALL as a digi. The only problem I can see with this "setup" is if hams con to NOCALL - this might use up the TNC buffer if there is no computer att. to it and thus lock up "NOCALL" Key board port. Lets also hope That the ECHO pram is turned off - Guss main thing - lets have fun and see what happens..
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Miles Mann (MAREX-NA)
April 8, 2001

Note, the proper call sign of the ISS has not been configured at this time.
On Sunday April 8, the call sign was NOCALL (that's a O not a zero).
The call sign will eventually be programmed for R0ISS.
The ISS crew is still making adjustments to the TNC.

ISS UnProto mode
The ISS PMS (Personal Mail System) supports the Digital-repeating mode called UnProto. I am not going to get into too much detail about UnProto, for more information check Amateur radio handbooks and back issues of Amateur Radio magazine. Basically UnProto is a way of sending packet messages without requiring an acknowledgment from the other station.

This is the Official Bulletin received from Frank Bauer, KA3HDO April 8, 2001:

All,
As you have been aware, the ARISS team has been debugging issues with the packet module over the past couple of months. We were fairly certain that the RAM battery backup died shortly after the equipment was commissioned back in November. I say this because I heard the packet beacon on one of the engineering check passes on November 13. So I am certain that the battery was still alive then.

We have been waiting for the crews (Expedition 1 and Expedition 2) to connect a laptop to the packet module to check out the packet system and re-install the packet parameters (including the Beacon Text and Beacon Every 12 commands). Our debriefing with the Expedition 1 crew this past week confirmed that they have been too busy to accomplish this task.

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April 16, 2001

April 15, 2001

April 13, 2001

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