Hi Tony,
Ah, good point. Six gigawatts EIRP is certainly a little more than the average Ham station can muster.
So, now the next question... How to do this best? It occurs to me that we should be able to predict when the Station is in a favorable attitude, presumably using the solar panels as reflectors like the Iridium Flares. There are several programs out there to do this for Iridium; could they be adapted to the ISS? For extra credit, predict the times when the solar panels are favorable to a QSO between your station and another?
Greg KO6TH
----------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:16:00 -0500 To: ko6th_greg@hotmail.com; amsat-bb@amsat.org From: aa2tx@comcast.net Subject: Re: [amsat-bb] Re: 144 Mhz contact made using ISS as passive reflector
At 11:49 PM 12/11/2007, Greg D. wrote:
I thought of doing this back in October, when all the Sputnik-1 / early satellite discussion was happening. Echo-1, and all that. But, I would think that NASA (if not the crew) would frown on a bunch of folks on the ground hurling a few megawatts EIRP at their home in outer space. If Bob had to have a bazillion levels of safety in place for the little PCSAT-2 transmitter, I would think this would be right up there in the safety category, no?
I haven't done the math yet... Are we far enough away that 1/x**2 saves us?
Greg KO6TH
Hi Greg,
The ISS flies through the 217 MHz AFSSS Radar Fence 6 times a day and it has an ERP of over 6,000 megawatts. It is only for about a second at the peak but even the sidelobes are much higher than anything a ham station could possibly come up with - no problem.
73, Tony AA2TX
_________________________________________________________________ The best games are on Xbox 360. Click here for a special offer on an Xbox 360 Console. http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/wheretobuy/