Details on the Ham Radio Equipment Being Used on the ISS

GPS receivers listening to 44W transmitters from 12,000 miles away can be heard saying hold my beer.

That's actually true for most electromagnetic telecoms. Ten orders of magnitude between the transmitted and received power is usually the easy case. With more careful techniques you can do even twenty or more orders of magnitude.

And yes, it baffles me as well.

This comment perfectly encapsulates what makes ham radio is so much fun. I'd argue that WSPR is even more fun than this.

I was the guy who posted the "ISS repeater on 437.8 Mhz" article. Likewise, I was surprised that I managed to catch a minute or so of audio from the repeater using my handheld Baofeng BF-F8HP. I wasn't even really expecting it.. I'd had the radio out earlier in the day when I was programming the new repeater info in with Chirp, then I stuck it back on the charger and left it... unintentionally leaving it both "on" and on that channel. A few hours later I was in the other room and heard noise from the room where the radio was charging and jumped up and ran in there, and realized I was hearing people talking on the ISS repeater.

I grabbed the radio and ran outside to try and get a contact on the repeater myself, but no luck. :-(

Still, just hearing it was kinda cool in its own right.

Edit: as luck would have it, the ISS just passed over about 5 minutes ago. I went outside ahead of time to wait for it, and I caught a bit of audio, but wasn't able to make any contact myself. I think I waited a little to long to try, out of fear of walking on somebody else (per the earlier discussion, I don't have a radio with cross-band full duplex capability). Oh well... live and learn. And I'll buy a better radio at some point.

Exactly right on the repeater -- you communicate with the ISS on a VHF uplink and it rebroadcasts your communication on a UHF frequency (Earth stations typically run in a single band with a small offset). It's hard to talk to the ISS because it's moving so fast that there's a Doppler shift in the frequencies, but it's definitely possible with cheap gear (I've picked it up many times, but never tried talking through it). People aren't using it to communicate per se, more just to make brief long-distance (DX) contact with other amateur radio users.

There are also occasional opportunities to speak directly with people on the ISS (or more commonly, receive telemetry or slow-scan TV images).

I had to look up what sk was... I think you're right

> By now you've probably guessed that George isn't exactly a spring chicken, and that he's getting up in years. This is very true and it is one of his great wishes that his collection find a permanent home after he's gone so that future generations can enjoy and appreciate the hobby for many years to come.

I wonder if anyone was able to make that happen.

That would be some garage sale...