By Miles Mann WF1F, MAREX-NA (Manned Amateur Radio Experiment, North American Division)

MIR Status:
Yesterday I called the chief of the Cosmonaut Amateur radio department in RSC Energia to discuss the status of the Mir Amateur Radio program.
I was informed the Mir crew is very busy with their daily choirs of waking up the large Mir space station.  It takes a long time to properly reactivate the space station.  The Mir Space Station has been sleeping for 9 months (August 21, 1999 - April 6, 2000).  The Mir crew needs to carefully monitor the battery status and properly align the solar panels to keep the batteries charged.  The guidance computer will eventually take over the work-load of flying the Mir station and controlling the solar panels.

A few people have heard voice activity on the Mir commercial down link channel on 143 MHz.  This downlink is used when Mir is in range of a ground relay station.   At one time there were many ground relay stations all around the world , on land and at sea.  Today there seems to be only a few active ground relay stations in Europe and Asia.  NASA has several relay stations in the USA which can support Mir communications, however none of them are active at this time.  The Mir station also uses a few commercial satellites as relays stations to augment their communications needs.  It is possible that you may not hear much activity on 143 MHz while Mir is over the Americas and VL lands.

No specific date has been given for activation of the Amateur Radio projects on Mir.  We just need to wait for the Mir crew to get all of their important work completed first.

Courtesy of Farrel Winder

Hello All Mir Fans,
    For those following the progress of Mir and the possible return of Amateur Radio SSTV, Voice and Packet after the new Crew boards Mir, there are interesting stories now running on the web:
               http://www.msnbc.com/news/303767.asp

Mir Amateur Radio Status:
The two Mir crew members are both experienced Amateur Radio operators and are familiar with Voice, Packet and SSTV procedures. During the recent retraining of Kaleri and Zalentin they came up with several suggestions for changes for the amateur radio station.  MAREX-NA is currently discussing with the engineers at Energia the change requests to see if any of the suggestions can be implemented. If all goes as planned the Mir Amateur Radio station may be reactivated between April 10 - 20 on 145.985 FM Simplex (Voice, Packet and SSTV).

The MAREX-NA web page has moved to a new location. We will try to keep the page updated with the latest Mir and ISS amateur radio experiments.
http://www.siliconpixels.com/marex

Copyright 2000 Miles Mann, All Rights Reserved.  This document may be freely distributed via the following means - Email (including listservers), Usenet, and World-Wide-Web.  It may not be reproduced for profit including, but not limited to, CD ROMs, books, and/or other commercial outlets without prior written consent from the author.
Images received from the MAREX-NA SSTV system on the Russian Space Station Mir are considered public domain and may be freely distributed, without prior permission.

DOSVIDANIYA Miles WF1F