Talked to the crew onboard the ISS today, but not the usual Amateur radio way. I am a broadcast TV engineer and we had a group from the local high school come to our studios where we linked them up with the ISS crew. Not on the expected 2 meter145 frequencies, but up on 14Ghz and down on 12Ghz, Ku band. The link actually went via NASA's Houston comm center and not directly to the ISS. Our uplink dish is 12 meters in diameter and capable of an ERP of about 3.5 million watts. It's been a while since I did an uplink as almost everything coming in and going out of our station is Fiber based these days. Even our Live trucks are moving away from microwaving their video back to the studio in leu of a neat little box called the "Back Pack". It's basically a box with 6 cellular connections all bonded together to allow very high bandwidth. The Photog straps it on his back and plugs his camera directly into it. No more need of an expensive microwave truck. There are also some other pretty cool technologies coming down the pike that I can't event talk about. The future of communications will be changing whether it be watching TV or talking on your iCom Amateur radio to the LEO satellites. Can't wait to see what the future holds.

Michael KC4ZVA