[amsat-bb] ISS Voice Reception Videos, and Trying To Make Contact

[John Brier]

Thank you Dave, someone else pointed me to ANS-095 posted earlier this day.
Under ARISS News:

+ A Successful contact was made between CEPES, Jodoigne, Belgium and
Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti IZØUDF using NA1SS The contact began
04-01 09:20 UTC  and lasted about nine and a half minutes. Contact
was telebridged via K6DUE.
ARISS Mentor was ON4WF.

Another provided even more detail from http://www.ariss.org/news.html:

A telebridge contact with students at CEPES, Jodoigne, Belgium, and
with students at Mimar Sinan Özel Okullar ı, İstanbul,Turkey, via
K6DUE was successful Wed 2015-04-01 09:20:45 UTC 49 deg. Astronaut
Samantha Cristoforetti, IZØUDF answered 16 questions alternating
between students in Istanbul and Jodoigne.

CEPES School
Cepes is situated in Jodoigne, a city in the French speaking region of
Belgium. It is a secundary school with 810 students. The students
participating in the ARISS project specialize in Sciences,
Mathematics, Languages and Human Sciences. They are 15 -20 years old.

During this school year, the curriculum is oriented to the ARISS contact :
                - Movements of the Earth and planets
                - Acquisition of scientific vocabulary
                - Studies of volumes and surfaces
                - Graphic studies
                - Use of instruments and techniques in model building
                - Study of the concept of scale and scaling in model building
                - Electricity: electrical systems
                - Read a map, compass rose, latitude, longitude
                - The effect of weightlessness on the human body
                - Translation of ARISS contact questions from French
into English


Mimar Sinan Collage
Mimar Sinan College is situated in Istanbul, Turkey. The students
prepared the questions after they learned about the ISS during science
lessons.They also watched videos of astronauts working in the ISS.

I am again disappointed to learn that random unscheduled contacts are
still uncommon, but I am glad to learn more about this. I saw a video
from the last year where someone made a random contact. I even asked
in the youtube comments if it was unscheduled and the ham confirmed
it. It was during an ARRL National Centennial Convention:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoFbhPXsUx0

On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 9:53 AM, Dave Taylor <dave.w8aas at verizon.net> wrote:
> What you heard was a scheduled ARISS contact: Samantha Cristoforetti IZØUDF aboard ISS was answering students questions for two schools in Belgium and Turkey.  This was a telebridge (a.k.a phone patch) via K6DUE in Maryland, which is why you were able to hear the downlink.
>
> You are correct that unscheduled contacts with ISS are uncommon.  I have not heard reports of the current crew making random contacts over the US.  However, ARISS contacts are frequently audible here.  They are announced on this list and elsewhere, and you can find the questions to be asked in some of the announcements and posted on the ariss.org site.  It’s always interesting to listen in.
>
> Dave, W8AAS
>
>
>> On Apr 5, 2015, at 9:09 AM, John Brier <johnbrier at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi folks, A year ago I recorded what has become a relatively popular
>> video on YouTube of a conversation between a Virginia school and
>> Astronaut Mike Hopkins:
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_SvIVRv-Ok
>>
>> I thought it wasn't common for the ISS to become active for
>> unscheduled contacts, but today I am learning that is not true, they
>> are randomly on the air. My first attempt at contacting them was an
>> early morning pass on April 1st (5:30am local, 0930 UTC). I recorded a
>> woman in the ISS talking about floating in space and such, but I had
>> some interference/intermod and was never able to make contact. Any
>> idea who this is? Does anyone know who she was talking to? It seemed
>> like a conversation with only one other person. Man I wish I could
>> have been that person! haha. Any other advice on making contact would
>> be appreciated. I will be trying to make contact again this evening.
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlQlYfInMS4
>>
>> John Brier, KG4AKV, Raleigh, North Carolina
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>