Year: 2017

International Space Station NA1ISS contact with GB4YOTA

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On Tuesday 8th August, there was a planned contact between the ISS and YOTA at 1837 UTC, so I decided to have a listen. There was an issue with the ISS VHF downlink during this pass, so the contact was rescheduled to the next pass, at 2015 UTC. You can hear Paolo IZØJPA apologise for the technical issues they had on the first pass at the beginning of the contact.

I was lucky enough to be able to hear both GB4YOTA and NA1ISS from my location, as the YOTA station was operating from Gilwell Park, which is only 18km NW from my location. The video below shows my reception of the contact. Antenna was a Diamond X-50 on the house, into an Icom IC-7100.

Receiving SSTV images from the ISS – ARISS 20th Anniversary

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In commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of ARISS, a Slow Scan Television (SSTV) event took place between the evening of Thursday 20th July until the morning of Monday 24th July. The International Space Station (Russian Segment) was transmitting a sequence of SSTV images showing the history of ARISS on a downlink frequency of 145.800MHz in FM mode and PD120 SSTV mode.

I started receiving them on the Friday, just for fun, but then thought it would be great to collect all 12 images, thinking at the time it might not be possible. However, over the three days, I did actually manage to receive all 12 images. Some I managed to get a few times, giving the choice of multiple images to pick from, others only the one, but I did end up with all of them. 6 of the 12 images I managed to get with no noise, the other 6 are with varying amounts of noise. Read more to see the images. (more…)

1/4 Wave Antenna Calculator

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I have been making a few 1/4 wave antennas lately, mainly for UHF and the GHz bands with good success, so I decided to create a calculator to simplify the process and maybe get some people who have not tried one before to give it a go.

For UHF for example, these can be made very cheaply, very easily and they perform well. Try one on 433MHz plugged into your handheld for example 🙂

Go to the 1/4 wave ground plane calculator

The 1/4 wave ground plane

The calculator is at m0ukd.com/calculators/quarter-wave-ground-plane-antenna-calculator/

A long break…

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It’s been a year to the day since I last posted an entry here. I have had quite an inactive year with regards to the hobby. Work takes priority of course, but I will get out and about this year and posting a bit more on my blog / pages. I do have some things to update and new pages to add when I have the time such as constructing a 20 element 1.3GHz Yagi, building a 1.3GHz system & some PSU reviews. l also have a few messages and comments to reply to which I am getting through slowly.

It’s been a long winter but spring is finally here so it’s time to get back into the swing of things 🙂