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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.
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.
They didn't use an off-the-shelf Yaesu/Icom/Kenwood/Alinco/whatever, but it still could have been amateur 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.
They made their own radio that used Amateur Radio frequencies (nitpick: Amateur Satellite Service freqs) as opposed to using a Yaesu or Kenwood radio on Amateur freqs. To hams like me, this isn't a big deal. Designing software-defined radios and protocols that can span Virginia->New Zealand using 1W of power is cool, but making an 5W VHF or UHF radio is so 1970's.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
"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.
well, no.
According to their blog (http://www.operationfirstcontact.com/index.html) they purchased the radio (Icom IC-V8000 2M ham transceiver) the antenna (Hy-Gain Oscar yagi) and the antenna rotator (Yaesu G-5500). The blog is kinda sketchy but they may have designed and built a microcontroller-based rotator controller to keep the antenna pointed at the ISS. The frequencies used are smack in the middle of the 2 meter ham band (~145 Mhz). The students put together off-the-shelf, commercial ham gear and contacted the ISS.
My issue isn't with the students, it's with the disparaging way Ham radio is presented in TFA: the student's contact with the ISS was not only PURELY using "a traditional ham radio", but a commercial ham radio at that. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but some of us hams still enjoy homebrewing our own equipment and TFA specifically says the radio was "home-built" and implied it was somehow different and superior to "tradtional ham radio".
Here's hoping the students will go on to be active hams!
73!
The sad thing is that Humber is the college attached to my university. This is really embarrassing: we should be able to do better, y'know?
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
http://www.operationfirstcontact.com/blog/episode16.htm
Today, Mr. Rector, Paul, and I went out to Radioworld and purchased a transceiver. After much research, we decided to go with the ICOM Ic-V8000. For the cost, it has exactly what we need. On Friday, we're going to be integrating it into our setup, and doing all the necessary testing.
The story is pretty hyped up but good on them anyway.
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.
Yeah, I'm getting conflicting info. First they built the radio, then they didn't. Then they build the antenna, then they didn't. Are they getting press for screwing on N-connectors?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
They built a Yagi. Woopie!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
, 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.
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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
Sounds like they're getting press for being able to turn it on. And this takes an art degree how?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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.
I dunno, but I wish I had the funds to setup a rotor. Manually aiming an Arrow II is pretty mundane.
There's a fair bit of flack over the article and I hope it doesn't dissuade any of the project team from hacking on more projects or getting involved with the hobbyist scene. As much as I find it odd they're being paid tribute for doing something many folks, over a wide range of ages, have done before - I'm sure most of us can appreciate how it felt for them to have accomplished this and don't want to put their ISS virginity back in the box.
It's pretty awesome to work your first space box!
In which case, Cornell's W2CXM station had the same capability back in 2002.
http://w2cxm.mae.cornell.edu/clubstation.html
The only thing CXM didn't have back then was automatic antenna rotator control for tracking satellites, which was added in subsequent years by undergrads to support Cornell's ICE CubeSat project - http://www.mae.cornell.edu/cubesat/.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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."
"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.
No Kidding!!
/. look - well, rather quaint.
/. Who thinks it would've made front page then?
And a "tech news" site gets all wet over this? Talk about being out of step with current technologies. Real shame when a 'tech news' site looses touch with the foundations of technology. This really does make
My son was making contacts via satellite and chatting with the ISS crew years.ago. He was 8 then. Maybe I should've submitted that to
This is "Entry Level" stuff for most any ham that can breathe and talk at the same time.
Senior NCO in the fight against entropy. I've seen things, man. Things no one should have to see.....
So they bought a radio and an antenna, plugged them in and they worked. Is that what constitutes post-secondary education these days?
Damn, I must be blind! ;)
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
I do think it tells us something about their school officials...
Turning it on with your penis is art.
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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"
The plug was originally designated PL-259. The mating socket was an SO-239. These are US Army Signal Corps designators.
When introduced commercially, they were called "UHF" connectors by the manufacturer, Amphenol. They are actually pretty lousy connectors for anything near the UHF band, though...
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...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...)