I just wanted to let you folks know that this Saturday morning August 05 starting at 0712L we were successful in contacting Jeff Williams on the ISS. We had a solid contact that lasted for almost 8 minutes. We had the home school students from IDEA and they all had some interesting questions for the Science Officer aboard the ISS. The contact took place at the Challenger Learning Center in Kenai, Alaska. This is the first school contact for Alaska and we are not really a school but we had some very good cooperation from Kenneth Ransom, N5VHO with NASA at JSC in Houston, TX who gave us tips and info we needed. I worked Jeff on split frequencies on 2 meters. Uplink was on 145.200 and downlink was 145.800. I was using IC910H with full power on 2 m. My antenna was an arrow with a pre-amp. I disconnected the UHF side and used the 3el 2m side only. I had it mounted on a tripod mount on the roof of CLCA. I also had az-el rotors to track the space station. The radios are back home now but the antenna is still on the roof. I will remove it later next week.

In response to the comment about ISS not being very active over Africa (Senagal)...

1) Do you mean that packet is only heard once every 1 minute?
If so, that is because no ground stations are sending packets via the ISS and only the beacon is being transmitted.

2) Do you mean packet not heard at all?
If so, the crew has not been keeping it on all the time for unknown reasons and you just got the short end of the deal.

3)Do you mean that no crew is on voice?
If so, then you are no different than most of the planet.

Kenneth - N5VHO