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LW2EIQ > SAREX 07.07.96 09:17l 129 Lines 6899 Bytes #-10880 (0) @ AMSAT
BID : 17729_LW2EIQ
Read: GUEST OE7FMI
Subj: re: STS-78 Operating Procedures
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From: LW2EIQ@LW2EIQ.7600.BA.ARG.SA
To : SAREX@AMSAT
Todd Little <little@pecan.enet.dec.com> said:
>
>This morning, while listening for STS-78, I heard a male voice saying
>"This is W5RRR listening", then he'd say "Go ahead", and then back
>to "This is W5RRR listening", and sometimes "Say again". I never
>heard anything else, i.e., no other call signs given, no signal report,
>no indication of a contact, no nothing. Was I really hearing STS-78,
>or was it a slim. If it was STS-78, wouldn't normal operating procedure
>be to acknowledge the call of the caller and provide some sort of
>exchange to make the contact complete? I really don't believe it was
>a slim because the signal was clearly peaking (although not very
>much) in the direction I expected to find Columbia.
I'm certain you did hear Columbia, and almost certain that you heard Chuck
Brady N4BQW. If it had a _heavy_ North Carolinan accent - then that was
him!
While W5RRR-1 is the packet call sign, W5RRR is the call for the JSC
Amateur Radio Club. Chuck is one of the few astronauts who is a true ham
(e.g. somebody who uses amateur radio pasionately as a hobby, not just as
part of SAREX) and I'm not absolutely sure why he's using W5RRR instead of
N4BQW. Certainly I expected him to use his own call but -- and this is
only my own theory - since he's not using his own personal hardware he may
feel more comfortable using the club call sign - that's just a guess on my
part though.
As far as what you heard - you've got to understand the geometries and
logistics of a SAREX voice QSO. The reason there are five different uplink
frequencies is to reduce the pileups. Anybody on the ground has a one out
of five chance of guessing the frequency chosen by the astronauts.
Obviously there will be more hams using the 144.95/145.55 pair because the
600 Hz. offset is easy to set on most radios. But from the shuttle
astronaut's point of view any frequency pair is as good as any other. If
they get too much of a pileup on one frequency then they'll change over to
another pair -- without announcing it! So everybody on the ground will
still hear the astronauts calling CQ, but a new bunch of folks will get the
opportunity to get through.
Another factor is the shuttle's altitude, and how FM VHF radio works with
line-of-sight contacts. On level ground most of us typically get about 40
miles range out of our radios at high power (e.g. a 45 watt mobile with a
mag mount antenna). Well at least I do. And a handheld with a rubber
duckie rarely gets more than 10-20 miles range. But that's because of
physical obstructions, and the non-directional nature of omni antennas. At
a typical shuttle altitude the shuttle is over the horizon for over a
quarter of the United States (or any other equivalent area) at any given
moment. Unless they're over the middle of the Pacific Ocean that's a lot
of potential hams to talk to!
The SAREX antenna is mounted in one of the cockpit windows, and is an
omnidirectional antenna. Depending on which way the shuttle is pointed,
there will be different reception patterns on the ground. (an excellent
program which actually plots out the antenna pattern is Dan Adamo's
MacSPOC. It even shows a little house with a radio antenna as the icon for
the point on the ground directly beneath the antenna! For those of you
without Macs - didn't you always want to buy a Macintosh?)
What you probably heard was Chuck trying to make random contacts. When he
said "Say again" he was probably trying to work somebody, but the contact
was marginal, either because of the shuttle's attitude, or many hams trying
to get through at the same time. Whenever he succeeds you would hear him
replying with the call sign of the person he contacted. So my guess is
when you were listening to him he didn't make any successful contacts which
he could pick out of the noise.
Gregory S. Williams commented:
>W5RRR is the JSC amateur radio club's call. Kent Castle, W5OJ is the trustee.
>
>Might have heard one of the other astronauts on the radio getting a trial by
>fire entry into HAM radio...
not likely. Whenever unlicensed astronauts have used SAREX for random
QSOs, school contacts, or whatever, they've used a control operator, and
the control operator's call sign. I can remember two cases where
astronauts without ham licenses got interested in doing random contacts and
I'm certain there have been others.
On the STS-64 mission Susan Helms used commander Dick Richards's call sign
KB5SIW. Once hams on the ground heard a female voice coming from space she
quickly became the most popular person on the crew -- and practically
nobody on the ground wanted to talk to anybody else! After the mission she
joked about getting '40 or 50 boyfriends' during the mission. I've got a
photo of her wearing the SAREX headset holding up a handwritten sign which
asks "Who are all these guys?"
She liked SAREX enough to get her own amateur radio license (KC7NHZ), which
she is currently using in orbit, and I've heard her operating the radio on
many passes. Before the mission I asked her during the preflight press
conference about how she got interested in SAREX and ham radio and this is
what she had to say:
>I wish I could say that I've been motivated in to studying ham radio since
>I was a child, but in fact I got shamed in to it. After I flew on 64 with
>the ham radio and had so much fun with it, using Dick Richards's call sign
>as I went over different parts of the world, that after landing I decided
>the best thing to do was get my own call sign and in fact I've gone off and
>done that. I got to participate as a speaker at a regional ham radio
>convention in Seaside Oregon and that pretty much told me I was doing the
>right thing since I had such a good time at that convention.
John Blaha was the commander of the STS-58 Spacelab Life Sciences 2
mission, which had many goals similar to the current STS-78 mission. While
he wasn't that interested in the ham radio aspect of SAREX on the ground it
did pique his interest in orbit. Bill McArthur KC5ACR showed him what to
do, and John worked a CONUS random QSO pass. I guess that was one of the
more unusual cases in the shuttle program for on the job training! When
John volunteered for one of the Mir missions, he chose to get his amateur
license, and will be operating from Mir as KC5TZQ in the near future.
Philip Chien, Earth News - space writer and consultant PCHIEN@IDS.NET
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Roger, go at throttle up CHR$(32) the final frontier
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