Hi!

I will be lurking on the ISS pass over the continental USA and northern Mexico this evening at 0248-0258 UTC. This pass will be at a maximum elevation of 42 degrees here in central Arizona, and I'm hoping to find other operators at the keyboard to possibly make a QSO or three. I use my Kenwood TH-D72A and Elk log periodic, and I can make QSOs using APRS messages.

If you don't use a similar radio or software like UISS, you can still send an APRS message from a simple terminal program. To do this for a message to the WD9EWK-9 call I normally use for packet/APRS, type:

:WD9EWK-9 :Here is a message

A colon goes before my call, a space followed by a colon goes after my call, and then the short message goes after the space and colon. That is all you need to do. The Kenwood APRS-ready radios won't display free-form text typed in a terminal program, but can handle APRS messages from other stations with no problems. I will respond with an APRS message, typed on the HT's keypad.

Last night during an overhead ISS pass, I worked 3 different stations - KG6FIY and KK6QMS in southern California early in the pass, followed by KE8AKW in Ohio later in the pass. The QSO with KE8AKW was the furthest I have ever worked a station using the ISS (digipeater, or cross-band voice repeater), at 2755km. I posted a longer writeup about this, complete with screenshots, in a thread on the QRZ.com satellite forum at:

https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/making-long-distance-iss-packet-qso...

Nick was ready for me when the ISS came up for him, and we wasted no time in completing a QSO. Since it appears that the theoretical maximum distance for a QSO through the ISS digipeater is in the neighborhood of 4400km, there is still some room to stretch the footprint. Both operators would need to be ready to do this, of course, given the limited amount of time there would be if the QSO distance approaches that theoretical maximum.

73!

Patrick WD9EWK/VA7EWK http://www.wd9ewk.net/ Twitter: @WD9EWK