Hi folks:
A student from Humber College (Toronto) has asked me several questions regarding contacting the ISS. One has to do with receiving a beacon, and the other has to do with antenna polarization. I've urged him to join AMSAT and get on the listserv, but in the mean time, I wonder if anyone can help him out with his questions.
Please reply directly to him ([email protected]) if you can help.
Thanks!
Ken, N6KTH
From: Paul Je [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, November 24, 2008 1:17 PM To: Ken Owen Subject: RE: ISS contact
Say Ken, we've set up our primary station just fine, but I was wondering if I could ask for your advice. Well, you see, we've tested the transceiver that we have (the ICOM IC-V8000), and we can transmit and receive just fine with it on our circular-polarized HyGain 2m antenna. Also, we did a VSWR test and our loss is minimal with the 75W transceiver that the ICOM produces. Ok, so here's the problem. Even with all the proper testing done, we still can't seem to pick up or hear the 166MHz beacon that the ISS produces.
My classmates and I are a bit worried/stressed out. I mean, just on last Friday, we did a test and someone drove at least 5km away from out college and heard us fine with the handheld radio he had. We had a signal strength of 3+ out of 5. He could've drove out even further, but we felt that we did enough testing to know that any attenuation losses were very minimal.
Well, do you know what the problem could be? Have you heard the beacon? What does it sound like? Maybe we should delay or advance the rotor by a few seconds? We're using NOVA software, and it allows us to send our transmission a few seconds ahead or behind.
Ok, so we have a circular polarized HyGain antenna hooked up to our Yaesu G5500. Uhm, this might sound dumb but do you know whether we should be right hand circular polarized or left hand circular polarized? Is the ISS right hand or left hand on 144.490MHz?
I'm trying to research this, but I'm having the hardest time to find this information out. Oh, also, since our antenna is circular-polarized, does the way we set our antenna have an effect on our transmission? I know this sounds confusing, but let me explain:
If you looked at our antenna from the front so that you could see all the dipoles/elements both vertically and horizontally to your view, well, should they be perfectly aligned with one set horizontal and one vertical? Both the vertical and the horizontal are perfectly 90degrees to each other, however, instead of being a perfect cross to your view, the elements are more like an "X" to your point of view (even though both are perfectly 90degrees to each other).
Well, hope to hear back from you.
Paul