Well, it’s time for a little upgrade to STAC, isn’t it? We’ve been here for a year now, and that’s a long time for no changes! There’s been an Icom UX-910 sitting in my drawers for quite some time, now, and it would be a waste of a considerable amount of money if it wasn’t installed. Some spare time and a bored me means it has been now! In short, this box adds 1.24GHz -> 1.3GHz capability to the station, in terms of radio equipment anyway. …

For the most part, the station has been tracking balloons this month as part of it’s duty in supporting university academic activities. The balloons launched were student built projects for masters projects, and they all worked to varying degrees of success. Initially we had Project Strathosphere, however this was launched on a day that I wasn’t able to track it and as such there’s no data downlinked, however it was launched and recovered successfully, admittedly with a little bit of luck. This used the base design for electronics was one that was developed with STAC providing the essential basics. This project had a wire dipole for an antenna. …

This pass started off quiet but got busier towards the end, as the ISS passed over the more Eastern European countries. The APRS software, AGWTracker, had some difficulty as not all station include their Latitude and Longitude data in the packets I was hearing. Also, updating the Keps was a good plan - everything was much clearer, even after our tracking software (currently Nova for Windows) said the ISS was out of range! …

Another busy pass, this time with 12 stations heard and placed on the map! So, we heard and placed Scotland (MM0XXP), England (G4ILO 2E0JXE G6HMS), Ireland (EI2GNB), The Netherlands (PD2RLD), Germany (DB3LA), France (G6EZP), Italy (IK1COA), Spain (EA1JM), Hungary (HA3HT) and Yugoslavia (YU7RD). Yugoslavia’s a new one - pretty far away as it goes (2011.06KM to be exact)… The ISS definately does it’s job for long distance communication on low power! …

This was a pretty quiet pass, with 6 stations being heard. From Left to right it reads: Callsign - Type - Mobile/Portable/Fixed - Distance - Latitude - Longitude - Number of Packets Received So, all in all we heard Germany (DG4BR DG3LA), Italy (IK3ZGB), Hungary (HA3HT), Spain (EA1JM) and England (G0GOO). Some familiar callsigns beginning to pop up. Transmission and Reception wasn’t the clearest - I’ll have to update the Keplarian Elements (see the bottom for more) by the looks of it. Interestingly, for me anyway, is that I can actually hear when the system isn’t going to be able to decode a packet, and there were quite a few of those moments, so I think that means I’ll need to look at the Elements. Will try again tomorrow with new ones and see if the quality increases and as such, reception improves. Another thing that’s worth taking away as a valuable lesson from playing with the ISS. …