NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren brought joy to many radio amateurs in recent weeks when he contacted them directly from the space station via the ISS repeater, giving some a QSO with NA1SS. In the past three to four years, there were mostly no connections with the crews outside of school contacts. On Friday 22 July, NA1SS was heard over Europe in the evening, allowing European radio amateurs to make a QSO. The following day, Joshua, DL3JOP, was able to make a QSO with NA1SS at 18:08 UTC. Motivated by this, John, DK9JC, also set off with his portable equipment to hear his call confirmed by Kjell on the next overflight 1.5 h later (21:45 h local). Anyone who also wants to try their luck should have a 2 m and 70 cm directional antenna and a full duplex transceiver system. The repeater's frequencies and CTCSS can be found on the ARISS website.

Nicht mehr lange, dann ist wieder Ham Radio in Friedrichshafen. Dieses Jahr zum 45. Mal. Wie die letzte 5 Jahre, bin ich auch dieses Jahr wieder dabei. Praktischerwiese verbinde ich die An - und Abreise immer mit einigen SOTA-Aktivierungen.

Die Ham Radio ist Europas bedeutendste Amateurfunkmesse und zeichnet sich durch die Kombination aus qualitativ hochwertigem Produktangebot und einem breit gefächerten Rahmenprogramm aus, das wir mit dem DARC als kompetenten Partner zusammenstellen. Es geht immer darum, aktuelle Themen aufzugreifen und gleichzeitig spannende Akzente zu setzen.

Die Ham Radio findet dieses Jahr von Freitag, 24. bis Sonntag, 26. Juni 2022, in Friedrichshafen am Bodensee statt. Die Tageskarte kostet 13 Euro. Die Drei-Tageskarte ist für 30 Euro erhältlich.

Weitere Informationen gibt es unter www.hamradio-friedrichshafen.de.

I recently bought an FT-818 to accompany my FT-817 to work portably on linear satellites. In this article I will show you how to set up Gpredict properly.

At home I use Gpredict for doppler correction under Windows. Gpredict is free software, but requires Hamlib/rigctl(d) for cat control. Hamlib is not self-explanatory because it is not a ready-made software. You have to create the individual parameters yourself. The necessary information can be found in Hamlib's Gitlab.

So you have to create a command for each transceiver. Since I use 2 transceivers for full-duplex, I have to create 2 commands.

The most important thing is to find out the ID of your transceiver. The list can be found here: https://github.com/Hamlib/Hamlib/wiki/Supported-Radios

For me it is ID 1020 for Yaesu FT-817 and 1041 for Yaesu FT-818.

FT-817 and FT-818 have slight differences in the CAT commands. Therefore there are 2 profiles. (This is also the reason why the current version of SatPC32 currently does not work with the FT-818. Only the FT-817 is supported there.)

Wow. Now I was also affected by it: My power amplifiers from the FT-817 blew up. After several hundred SOTA and /p activations it happened at home while I was listening to SSB satellites. Especially with the old non-ND versions (like mine) the power amplifier starts to oscillate by itself and destroys itself by self-oscillation then. The older MITSUBISHI RF POWER MOS FET 2SK2975 were not that good. I had already read a lot about this on the internet. The FT-817 suddenly became very hot and had a permanent current consumption of 2 amps. It was clear then that the FETs were short-circuited.

After I kept seeing new SSTV images sent from the ISS on Twitter, I thought I'd give it a try too. Since I've been doing a lot of radio via FM amateur radio satellites lately anyway, I have a small 4 element LogPer directional antenna at the window anyway.

The free open source Android software "Robot36" was often recommended as software. I was very surprised when it gave a very clear picture even without a cable between my handheld radio and my mobile phone. In Robot36, however, you should select the mode manually and not leave it to chance whether "auto" works. Currently PD120 was used, which is what ARISS announced (see original message below).

I was able to achieve very good results with my Yaesu FT2 and FT4. With every pass I could decode at least 1 complete picture. The antenna was always an Anjo 4 ele logper held out of the window on a 2m wooden broomstick and the ISS was tracked via the Android app "ISS Detector".