Archive - 2009
January 3rd
Deal Sets Space Tourist Flights from New Mexico
The company planning to take tourists into space, Virgin Galactic, and the State of New Mexico announced today that they have signed a 20-year lease agreement - a deal worth an estimated $150 million to $250 million which firmly plants the spaceline operator's world headquarters in New Mexico to make use of Spaceport America.
The inland Spaceport America is billed as the nation's first purposely built commercial spaceport.
Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic firm will make use of the WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo launch system - now under development at Scaled Composites in Mojave, California - to loft paying customers at $200,000 a seat on suborbital treks departing from Spaceport America.
January 2nd
VHF Alone
Hi, I am Vivek Bansal from India. I am desperately trying to make a QSO with the crew but am unsuccessful. I only have a VHF rig and hence am unable to use the crossband repeaters. I am calling at 144.450 and try to listen at 145.800 but I hear nothing. I have made a special egg beater antenna for this purpose and am able to hear all the local stattions clearly. Please help if u think I am doing something wrong.
ISS Radio Report
ISS Radio Report
ISS Radio Report
ISS Radio Report
January 1st
ARISS Update--25th Anniversary of Ham Radio in Space--Jan 1, 2009
All,
Happy New Year!!
The ARISS team hopes you are all enjoying the diverse amateur radio opportunities that have occurred on the ISS over the past several weeks. We want to thank Mike Fincke, KE5AIT, for his outstanding support to the ISS Ham Radio community. His efforts have been phenomenal!
This e-mail provides an update of the ARISS special event opportunities for the next two weeks. As previously mentioned, the ARISS team is currently celebrating 25 years of amateur radio operations from space.
This past week, the ISS Ham radio system was configured in the L/V crossband repeater mode. This configuration will continue through to Saturday when a school contact is scheduled around 10:35 UTC. After the school contact on Saturday January 3, it is our plans to have Mike Fincke reconfigure the radio to support V/U crossband repeater operations. As a reminder, that configuration has a 145.99 MHz uplink frequency including PL tone of 67.0 and a 437.80 MHz downlink frequency. All repeater operations are being performed in low power (5 W) mode. It is our intent to keep the repeater active in this configuration for 2 weeks (through January 17).