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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.
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. ;-)
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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!
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.