After months of inactivity, the ISS is finally back on voice.
Mikhail Tyurin has been heard twice over North America answering questions to unidentified ground stations.
The contacts are unknown and not part of any official Ariss activity.
The uplink probably wasn't the standard one since many stations all over the US and Canada tried to have the contact unsuccessfully.

Expedition 14 Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and flight engineers Mikhail Tyurin and Thomas Reiter continue to prepare for a spacewalk Wednesday, Nov. 22 out of the International Space Station's Russian Pirs Docking Compartment airlock.

Lopez-Alegria, who will make his sixth spacewalk, and Tyurin, with three previous spacewalks to his credit, climbed into Russian Orlan spacesuits Friday to test all systems and communications gear. This ended a week during which the spacewalkers also installed U.S. lights on their suit helmets, reviewed procedures for the extravehicular activity and performed leak checks on the Progress 22 craft currently docked to the Pirs airlock.

Houston - NASA officials will hold a briefing at 1 p.m. CST Thursday, Nov. 16, to discuss an upcoming spacewalk from the International Space Station. The six-hour spacewalk is planned for the night before Thanksgiving.

On Nov. 22, Expedition 14 Commander Mike Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin will retrieve equipment and photograph the station's Russian Zvezda Service Module's docking port. Tyurin also will hit a golf ball from a specially designed tee mounted on the Pirs airlock as part of a Russian commercial activity. Flight Engineer Thomas Reiter will remain inside the station tending to systems during the spacewalk.

The first live HDTV broadcast from space took place Wednesday. It featured Expedition 14 Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer Thomas Reiter, serving as camera operator. The broadcast was carried by Discovery HD Theater and NHK and was also shown at Discovery Channel stores. Known as the Space Video Gateway, the system transmits high bandwidth digital television signals to the ground that are not only spectacular, but also valuable to scientists, engineers and managers.

Source: http://ftp.amsat.org/amsat/archive/sarex/48hour/msg00105.html

Somebody posted a voice report on Nov 16 at 1837 GMT. Unfortunatly, it contains no details about where, exactly when and what frequency this was heard on. Any one have the info?

Kenneth - N5VHO

The scheduled ARISS QSO between students assembled at Landesmuseum fuer Technik und Arbeit (Mannheim Museum), Mannheim, Germany and ESA Astronaut Thomas Reiter has been assigned a new contact time of 15:57 UTC. The contact day remains unchanged at Monday, November 20, 2006. As a result of this hourly time change this telebridge event will now be supported by ground station VK5ZAI located in Kingston SE, Australia.

Live audio will be available on IRLP and EchoLink through the ARISS Audio Distribution Project

IRLP users can connect to the main channel of "Discovery" Reflector 9010. The audio feed will begin approximately 10 minutes before the scheduled contact time. Streaming audio will also be available through www.discoveryreflector.ca:8000/listen.pls (expect a 2 to 3 minute delay on this stream).

A Space Flight Training Division Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM) was held at Johnson Space Center on November 6-10. The ARISS-Russian team from Energia, representatives from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC), and ARISS-U.S. members attended. As a result of the meeting, the ARISS U.S. team may be tasked to perform more of the amateur radio training to reduce the amount of time that U.S. crews spend in Russia.

Source: http://www.rac.ca/ariss/oindex.htm

In spring 2007, The History Channel plans to run a 13-segment series, "The Secret Life of Machines." One segment will cover Amateur Radio, part of which will focus on ham radio in space. ARISS delegate Rosalie White described the roles of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (AMSAT) and the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) to the History Channel reporter, and provided information on SuitSat-1 and SuitSat-2 and explained how the ARISS team compiles components, and designs, tests and launches its systems. Follow-up material, which covered SuitSat-1 and an ARISS school whose 5th graders built 5 types of crystal radios and compared their qualities, was sent to him.