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Students Call Space Station With Home-Built Radio
Pizzutz writes "Four Toronto college students have accomplished a technological feat that their teachers are calling a first. The Humber College seniors made contact with the International Space Station Monday with a radio system they designed and built themselves. School officials say that, to their knowledge, that's never been accomplished by students at the college level." Somewhat disappointingly, the students actually did have permission to make contact.
Somewhat disappointingly, the students actually did have permission to make contact.
No kidding. But this does open the door to prank calls to the ISS. I can't wait for some of those to get posted to YouTube. Or shown on NASA TV.
This guy's the limit!
Somewhat disappointingly, the students actually did have permission to make contact.
I imagine one could get in a lot of trouble prank calling the ISS. Though it it some what difficult to come up with space themed prank calls akin to "Is your refrigerator running". Still though, they got a good grade in the class I'm sure and likely had a lot of fun doing it. I'd say that's a grand accomplishment even if they did have permission to do it.
HAM radio amateurs including students have been in contact with ISS many times over, using voice and digital connections (Packet Radio)
Many of the astronauts on board are HAM radio operators and make frequent contact with schools, institutions and individual amateurs. On the ground, many of these individual amateurs have designed built their own rig.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
"Somewhat disappointingly, the students actually did have permission to make contact. "
And why is that disappointing? I think it's incredibly cool that they had permission to do something like this and would love to see officials (both school and space) take similar steps to encourage students to push the boundaries. I don't see how this is disappointing at all.
...Cap'n Crunch responded by saying "tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet", and subsequently found out that, yes, the fridge on the ISS is in fact running.
ARISS (Amateur Radio on the International Space Station) program has been around for years. Probably hundreds of schools have built radios to talk to the space station for 10 minutes and ask whatever questions they want. If any of you want to talk to the space station here is the link. http://www.arrl.org/ARISS/ I think it is mostly a high school program though, I am glad to see Humber students are doing what high school students around the world are accomplishing.
Students built some sort of radio which they used to communicate with someone at distance?
Will the wonders of this modern era ever cease?
It's going to be considerably more difficult for the next generation to build their first radios, once it's all gone digital.
There won't be much left to listen to on a simple crystal set.
You shouldn't be encouraging readers to attempt broadcasts without permission. Unlicensed broadcasts with power sufficient to reach the International Space Station can be a safety hazard; potentially interfering with or jamming legitimate transmissions. At the very least, one might distract the ISS crew during an important maneuver/space walk when the entire crew needs to be focused.
(Think of it a bit like having the phone ring when you're in the middle of moving heavy furniture. Not exactly opportune.)
These kids did the right thing by having official permission to make the broadcast. Especially because it meant that there was an astronaut available to speak with them. If it was an unlicensed transmission without prior approval, they would have gotten "hung up" on. ;-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Oh Em Gee! College students built a radio?!? What a surprise. What is the world coming to when some news article thinks building a radio is amazing. Is everybody that stupid?
Yawn. While not just anyone can do what they've done, I'm saddened by the fact that an Amateur Radio hobbyist making a simple FM transceiver is considered news-worthy by the masses. What happened to the spirit of 'Experimentation and Advancement of The Radio Art'? Have we as a species lost our curiosity and drive to learn about and then do new things? I guess the TV has won. 8-(
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
...While school contacts with the space station are routinely made through the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station program, many of those contacts are made using a traditional ham radio.
They did not use HAM radio.
http://www.operationfirstcontact.com/blog.htm
Because you are just too right. Forty years ago before personal computers, to get any brownie points for this kind of thing at school you had to wind the coils yourself or bake your own resistors, because hobbyist magazines were full of designs. Ah, the great days of acorn tubes and bending aluminum chassis plates. Or the day I accidentally jammed the TV signal in a quarter mile radius, owing to the amazing bandwidth of some ex-mil tubes and misreading a capacitor value. But, sadly, that's why the authorities discourage experimentation nowadays. It's so much easier to cause problems.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Ummm, folks? They're Canadian college students, tech school level, not university. They designed and built a 2m band 5 watt transceiver.
When I was in college in the 90's, designing and building a low power FM transceiver from the ground up was considered a good third year project. I'm guessing that they had to design everything from power supply to antenna, and probably fabricate it themselves.
Good on you, guys!! I'm da*ned proud of you. especially the adult student who went back for more schooling.
ISS= International Space Suckers
What are you talking about?
Many people build the own radios, have since the turn of the last century. www.arrl.org will help you understand how to do that, and how to get a license. The very sad thing is that Humber doesn't realize just how many Amateur Radio clubs there are, of students organized by the university or college, even in Toronto. There is nothing special about what has been done here, at all.
"Broadcast" is not what we are talking about, that's something else.
"The Humber College seniors made contact with the International Space Station Monday with a radio system they designed and built themselves."
Ummm... so what? It's not like radios are hard to build, or the information to build them is hard to find, or the parts are hard to obtain.
These kids did not build their own radio. The bought an Icom Ic-V8000 radio and a Yaesu G-5500 rotator and built their own antenna. One of the kids got a ham license and they were able to get some time with the IIS.
http://www.operationfirstcontact.com/blog/episode16.htm
The only thing they did was build an antenna basically. I'm happy for them (we could use more kids getting into Ham radio) but this story is sensationalizes on something that many people have done before.
FTA: "While school contacts with the space station are routinely made through the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station program, many of those contacts are made using a traditional ham radio."
Seriously people - We should feel pretty damned scared that this counts as some sort of "achievement" to crow about on the Slashdot FP. These guys built a home-brew shortwave radio as their senior project?
Sorry if this sounds like "playa-hatin'", but gimme a break! Even as a "first", this doesn't sound like anything to brag about.
For my parents' generation:
They got free time in high school if they were well behaved and interested to play with this kind of stuff. Maybe they didn't go at this level but it was available. My generation: For us we didn't get that level of freedom till senior level courses in college, and that was obviously slipping towards graduate courses. Otherwise it is really up to the kids on their own or with their parents help to pursue hands-on learning. Of course, I don't blame any school offical for being extra-careful when everyone has a lawyer at their hip.
While school contacts with the space station are routinely made through the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station program, many of those contacts are made using a traditional ham radio.
Well, hams contacted Skylab when Owen Garriott was onboard (he's a ham) and many hams build there own radios. So while it's a neat project for college students and they deserve a round of applause for doing it, it's not like people haven't built their own radios to contact astronauts in space.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Sorry, the Iranian kids called first. We have to put you on hold.
This is my sig.
man, i qualify as old, but i think a
prank call to the iss would be pretty funny.
you have to be one uptight corporate tool ... well, funny.
to not find a harmless prank with high
humor value
uh, get off my lawn?
Don't worry. The metamods should pick it up.
This project is embarrassing. It took five college seniors ("Wireless and Telecommunications Technology" majors, no less) a whole year to build and use a pointable ham VHF antenna comparable to a fringe-area TV antenna. That's all they built; the transceiver was a stock ICOM Ic-V8000, which is a ham mobile radio that's basically a CB radio with higher power (75W) and fewer restrictions built in. This is not exotic technology. NASA has a program devoted to doing this in high schools.
From their blog, the only big problem was getting permission to go on the roof of a building (a large flat roof) to put up the antenna. If they'd just headed out to an open field (they're using a radio intended for car installation, after all), mounted the antenna on a tripod, and aimed it by hand, they probably could have completed the project in a week.
Hams talk to the ISS all the time. When it's visible, it's only a few hundred miles away, after all. The only real problem is booking some astronaut time. If you don't want to bother with that, the ISS has an open packet repeater hams can use. It's only 9600 baud, using an old TNC. This technology is so old it was on Mir.
Their blog is like reading Twitter output:
Of course, we've been busy for real lately. There's a whole bunch of new stuff going on. Exciting stuff! For instance, we soldered the connectors to the control wires for our antenna's rotor. After all that was said and done, we were able to control the movement of our antenna from inside room N214. Here's a few pictures of us working on that.
In 1962 you could shell out $29.95 for a Heathkit "Two'er", a 5-tube 2-meter transceiver, quite capable of contacting another Two'er 100 miles away with just a coathanger for an antenna. And you did not make headlines for having assembled the kit or pressed the mike button.
They built a Yagi. Woopie!
1. Purchase radio, rotor, and antenna.
2. Connect coax to radio and antenna.
3. Connect power to radio.
4. Connect rotor to power and control and research how to point antenna at moving satellite on Internet.
5. Arrange contact with ISS beforehand.
6. Receive kudos on Slashdot?
I have the equipment at home to do this. Anyone want to come over and see if we can get the astronauts to answer without arranging contact first? Hams do it all the time.
This would be great for someone in middle school. For someone in college... pick up a soldering iron. My only hope is that they didn't submit this to Slashdot themselves.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
What, you expected the ISS to answer to just answer anybody who called ? Of course they needed some technical information, like their phone number. :-)
, whereas the internet, cellphones, and other "modern" communications systems rely on a shitload of pre-existing infrastructure before they will work.
Ham radio just needs a radio and antenna at each end, and it works. No telephone companies, backhoe fade, DDOS attacks, etc.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Do you think they need free RingDings on the ISS?
Kettering Grammar School were doing this in the 1960s. See the links in Wikipedia for more information.
Andrew Yeomans
The ISS caries a simple 2 meter FM radio. When over head the station is about 200 miles away, not very far.
Ham radio has a 100 year tradition of "home brewing". Hams (radio amateurs) have been building equipment at home in large numbers for about 100 years now. It's a very common world wide hobby. There are about 1/2 million people with amateur radio licenses living in the USA right now. A lot of these people build radio equipment and the radio used in ISS is NOT what you'd call "high tech" A couple hundred dollars worth of gear is all that is needed to make contact. Well that and the some free computer software that will tell you when the station is over your location and where to aim the antenna.
As for designing your own radio. That was a big deal in the 1930's back when we used tubes and slide rules. But now the parts are so easy to use. Some really nice integrated circuits are available that make designing almost like building a with Lego blacks.
The electronics instructor/technician at the Colorado School of Mines made radio contact with the ISS more than four years ago.
Students at the University of Nitwitshire make history by transmitting digital data wirelessly using a radio transmitter and receiver they built themselves.
But the "need to know anything about what's going on inside" - is it healthy for society that for most of the population electronics is a form of magic?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Stupid article...
Come on Slashdot, stop wasting my time.
"making an 5W VHF or UHF radio is so 1970's"
Yeah, my daughter's middle school class was going to make model rockets until they realized that third-law propulsion was so 1680s.... :-)
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Telemarketers! I look forward to ISS crew having to screen their calls to prevent annoying junk peddlers.
The article is grossly inaccurate, but what these guys did is still pretty neat. (I'm not convinced it's worthy of a college level graduating project, but luckily for them, it's not up to me.) They didn't really 'build' anything; they bought the antenna and the radio. Calling it (correctly) a 'transceiver' doesn't mean they put any more effort into it than the guy who strolled into best buy to pick up a new radio for his car.
Still, they set up the rig and went through all the red tape to get the school to let them do it, and they did get to talk to someone on the space station. It's certainly not new (did the people who wrote the article do *any* background research?), but it's still pretty cool.
Also, looks to me like they were just on the 2m band, so does "getting permission" really just mean "someone will be at the 2m radio on the space station to respond"? Last I knew, anyone with a ham license can hop on 2m any time...
Folks, this was for an amateur radio contact. It was done with an off the shelf VHF transceiver from Icom. Amazing what happens with the PR folks get ahold of something... If you are interested in this sort of thing, I would suggest www.amsat.org and www.arrl.org as resources.
I fail to see why this is even news. It's trivial to talk to the space station on a radio. When it comes over the horizon, it's line of sight. You can talk to it with a whip antenna and a half a watt of power. It's not rocket science at all as long as you know when it's going to come over the horizon.
Why ?!? It seems to me that at least one of the guys involved has a regular ham radio license What is disappoining is the smugness demonstrated by some slashdotters about what the canadian guys actually did. If you read the story and their blog, they had to understand how the whole thing works, to built antennas, to learn how to track the bird and to operate. It isn't rocket science, but it is not easy to do. After all, this can be the beginning of a career, just like it happened to me about twenty years ago, when through ham radio I got involved into science and signal processing. I am now a senior scientist for a Fortune100 company, but I am no more involved into ham radio: just a few years after my graduation I stared smelling into ham radio this kind of smugness that appears in some of the answers to this story, and I quitted. I had nothing more to learn, and people I met through the hobby were too proud of themselves to be interested in learning something new from me. Maybe the fault is not with young people, isn't it ?!?
Doesn't anyone do any fact checking?
Nope. Just watch Southpark's second episode. Cartman cheats, badly. When the cheating is uncovered, nobody cares, because the media spotlight is upon them.
It's as true today as it was ten years ago.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Look at the comments, A lot of people are telling this project sucks because it's made of existing technology ...
Why not give them a break? When I was able to fix my first TV, I was HAPPY! Because I could do it!
You didn't really need to expect I'd be assembling it from zero!
I've learned things are also good outside our hacker/creating-mentality ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
proposing a HAM radio for a senior design project at my school would have gotten you laughed out of your advisor's office, you should be able to design and build one from scratch during non-linear electronics class freshman or sophomore year...or at age 13 if you can read a book.
The ISS is only 240 miles up. The astronauts can only see a small amount of Earth's surface at any given time. This was mentioned once on Astronomy Cast - which I highly recommend, and you can get it straight from the horse's mouth here:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp7/luletters/lu_letter5.html
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
that this is news. I don't know how much they've dumbed down the test since then, but in the days when you still had to learn code at 5wpm for a novice license - ANYONE who passed the written exam had enough knowledge to build an antenna. Hell, anyone who could get a tech or general class license (the minimums that allowed voice communication) could have designed the transmitter as well! Get off my lawn! 73 de n2auz
So do they know where to get some Tang? How did I get this number? Shut up!
Will you and the rest of the GNAA come after me?
If you are worried about that, try thinking about baseball.
I do think it tells us something about their school officials...
I'm happy for them, but I'm not impressed.
Amateur radio folks have been building their own hardware for decades. They've been bouncing signals off the Moon and meteor trails for almost half a century.
ISS is less that 300 miles away when it is overhead.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
...from University of Hawaii, in the early 1990s. A colleague of mine was a postdoc there and introduced me to the guys that did it. They had set it up pretty much for kicks, after a long string of voice contacts ith the cosmonauts (who must have been pretty bored up on their end too...)
you don't necessarily need permission to contact the station. If your a HAM radio operator you can get in touch with the Space Station. Astronauts and Cosmonauts are usually talking on the radio during their free time.
Though it it some what difficult to come up with space themed prank calls akin to "Is your refrigerator running".
I suppose calling them and telling them to stay up there since Earth has been wiped out would be in bad taste ;)
Better yet: Call them and say that apes have taken over the planet and enslaved the human race.
First, this is a cool project, and it's interesting and different these days.... BUT
having read the blog, here was there plan.
The student design involves two fully redundant back-up radiocommunication systems, each of which is comprised of a power system, a VHF transceiver, tracking station software, an azimuth and elevation gimbal device, a PIC micro-controller interface unit and an antenna system. The radiocommunication systems use 2 VHF frequencies for carriers, a 100W transmitter and an ultra-sensitive receiver coupled to a Circular Polarized satellite antenna mounted on a fully articulated system, with 180 degrees of rotation in elevation and 360 degree rotation in azimuth.
Sounds good eh? well, they didn't build the radio, they bought a ICOM Ic-V8000, and they didn't build the antenna they bought a Hy-Gain OSCAR-style Yagi, and they didn't build the rotor for it, they bought a Yaesu G-5500 rotor.
I hope they wrote the tracking software... or at least built the backup radio and antenna, but so far from my reading it's not looking good.
So a bunch of college radio students hooked up a radio they bought, one of them took a course somewhere else to get his amateur radio license, obtained permission from ARISS (The primary purpose of ARISS is to allow students engaged in a science and technology curriculum to speak with an astronaut orbiting the Earth on the International Space Station. Using amateur radio, students ask questions about life in space or other space-related topics... yes it happens enough that this organization does just that)
Now just to clarify for America and the rest of the world, these college students aren't the equivalent of MIT grads, College here in Canada is not like College in the states, we use the term College for 2-3 year course trade school, you graduate with a diploma for a specific job, American's use the term College for what we call University, you take intellectual courses that further your education and specialize your education, but you end up with a BA or a PHD etc.
But that said, this sounds more like it should have been a grade 11 science fair project, not a college radio communications project in Humber's Wireless and Telecommunications Technology course.
So either the quality of education is severly dropping or it sounds like I'm missing how hard this is.
when i was looking for more info on this story i found another one here's somebody else who also has contacted the station http://www.universetoday.com/2008/10/27/ham-radio-operator-communicates-with-space-station/
So considering they are even receiving a 2009 Telecom Laureate Awards at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, I hope this was more difficult then it is beginning to sound. Hmmm
I'm sorry, but this is embarrassing. These students didn't DESIGN anything -- they just bought and assembled a ham radio station using commercial components. As far as I can tell from reading their blog, nothing was "home built".
It's like saying I DESIGNED a computer because went to Best Buy and bought a CPU, monitor, keyboard, and mouse -- and I hooked them up together, all by myself!! What a joke!
They BOUGHT the antenna, rotor, and radio. They did not even DESIGN or BUILD the antenna, they ASSEMBLED it!! They took the pieces out of the box, followed the instructions included in the box, and screwed the pieces together together.
It's not like they bought metal conduit pipe and welding rods, cut the pieces to the correct length, and put them together to make the antenna. I'm sorry, but there is a book called the "ARRL Handbook" that has been published every year for ham radio operators for DECADES, and it walks you through the very simple steps of designing and building an antenna like what they bought. I would know, I built a few of these when I was 12 years old back in the late 80's!
The sad thing is that 20 years ago, most colleges had an amateur radio club that did projects like this on a regular basis. It was not news, it was basic electronics and radio communications.