[jamsat-news:2341] ANS-077 AMSAT Weekly Bulletins

AMSAT NEWS SERVICE
ANS-077

ANS is a free, weekly, news and information service of AMSAT North America,
The Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation. ANS reports on the activities of a
worldwide group of Amateur Radio operators who share an active interest in
designing, building, launching and communicating through analog and digital
Amateur Radio satellites.

Please send any amateur satellite news or reports to:

ans-editor@amsat.org

In this edition:
* AMSAT/TAPR Banquet at Dayton 2007
* Suitsat-2 Hardware Takes Shape
* OSCAR I Pioneer SK
* Call for donations for ARISS Antennas on Columbus
* Call for Papers--2007 ARRL/TAPR DigitalCommunications Conference
* ARISS Status - 12 March 2007


SB SAT @ AMSAT $ANS-077.01
AMSAT/TAPR Banquet at Dayton 2007

AMSAT News Service Bulletin 077.01
 From AMSAT HQ SILVER SPRING, MD.
March 18, 2007
To All RADIO AMATEURS
BID: $ANS-077.01

AMSAT is pleased to announce the first AMSAT/TAPR Banquet will be held Friday
evening May 18,2007 at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, OH in conjunction with
the 2007 Dayton Hamvention. The two groups share many members and this gives
everyone the opportunity to attend both dinners. The "Dinner Under the
Wings" festivities will begin at 18:00 with a cash bar and appetizers in the
Air Power Gallery (World War II). The buffet dinner will be served at 19:00
in the Cold War area. Following a few AMSAT and TAPR announcements after
dinner you will be free to roam the museum. The price for the dinner is
$35.00 per person and includes appetizers, salad, meal, dessert, coffee, iced
tea, tax and gratuity. 
See http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/ for information about the museum.

The museum will close at 22:00 and everyone must be out of the museum by then.

Vegetarian meals are available if selected when you purchase your ticket.

Reservations are required. These can be purchased online at the AMSAT Store
http://www.amsat-na.com/item.php?id=100133
or from the TAPR web site at http://www.tapr.org/dayton.html 

There will be no Banquet ticket sales at the AMSAT booth this year. We expect
this to be a very popular event, so reserve your tickets early.

Reservations will close this year on Monday night, May 14,2007 to allow us to
give the museum a count on Tuesday.

Everyone is responsible for their own transportation to and from the museum.

There will be no banquet speaker this year to give everyone a chance to view
the exhibits.

Banquet Menu available on the AMSAT web site

At 5:00 PM on Friday afternoon there will be a special showing of the IMAX
movie "Space Station". This movie is approximately 47 minutes long and
contains about 4 minutes of amateur radio contacts between school children
and the International Space Station. The IMAX theater is located in the
museum building off the main lobby area. Attendees at the movie will be able
to go to the banquet at 6:00 PM when the doors open about 10 minutes after
the movie is over. The lobby contains restrooms, telephones and some
seating. At least 50 people must sign up for the movie in advance. Call the
museum IMAX theater on (937)-253-IMAX to make reservations. Special rates
apply for children and seniors. Adults are $6.00, seniors are $5.50 and
children 8 through college 22 (student ID required) are $4.50.

[ANS thanks Gould, WA4SXM,for the above information]

/EX


SB SAT @ AMSAT $ANS-077.02
Suitsat-2 Hardware Takes Shape

AMSAT News Service Bulletin 077.02
 From AMSAT HQ SILVER SPRING, MD.
March 18, 2007
To All RADIO AMATEURS
BID: $ANS-077.02

Bob McGwier, N4HY, AMSAT's VP of Engineering provided the following update on
the development of hardware for Suitsat-2.

We had a complete breakthrough on the Odyssey Siren in the past two weeks. It
will be used in Suitsat 2, in a terrestrial linear repeater experiment by
Viktor Kudielka OE1VKW and friends, who supported its development, and we are
already leaping all over the place to applications.

Frank Brickle and I will be doing our SDR code on it over the next several
days. The board as shown in the schematic needs some modifications to fix the
3 - ish volt power supply for the Codec and a modified oscillator circuit but
we are certain it will all work now.

On the 10.7 MHz IF, I measured 0 dBm max into a 50 ohm load and less than -120 
dBm MDS and > 80 dB dynamic range. This is with a BOM of <$50 in parts and 
about a $20 dsp pic chip!

Yesterday in Rick's, W2GPS, lab, with Tom, K3IO, we made the above
measurements, hacked on code and turn the thing into a bent pipe transponder.
I also did the hilbert transform to make it an inverting transponder. It all
worked perfectly.

Detected audio in an SDR-IQ SDR as well as captured IF from the SDR-IQ of the
transponder. Can be downloaded and heard from:
http://www.cnssys.com/~w2gps/amsat_files/suitsat/

We have to balanced for image and do DC offset correction but the thing works
and sounds great as you can hear for yourself!

Additional details and pictures of the hardware can be found at
http://hpsdr.org/wiki/index.php?title=ODYSSEY

[ANS thanks Bob, N4HY, for the above information]

/EX


SB SAT @ AMSAT $ANS-077.03
OSCAR I Pioneer SK

AMSAT News Service Bulletin 077.03
 From AMSAT HQ SILVER SPRING, MD.
March 18, 2007
To All RADIO AMATEURS
BID: $ANS-077.03

Passing away last week, we remember a WWII vet who helped launch the 1st
civilian satellite.

Richard 'Dick' Esneault never had a day of basic training, never fired a shot
in a war and never finished college.

But the electronics whiz of the 1940s was a highly-sought-after non-combatant
soldier during World War II. He also became a successful Huntsville business
owner during the height of the 1960's boom.

Outside his family, Esneault's biggest accomplishment was his role in helping
develop and launch the first civilian satellite, OSCAR (Orbiting Satellite
Carrying Amateur Radio), made by a group of ham radio operators.

The 10-pound, three-watt radio transmitter was launched Dec. 12, 1961, from
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, riding on the back of an Atlas-Agena
booster carrying a military reconnaissance satellite. Its Morse code
message, "Hi," was received by more than 570 radio amateur tracking stations
in 28 countries.

The homemade satellite, built primarily from donated parts at an out-of-pocket 
cost of $63, beat the multimillion-dollar satellite Telstar to space by seven 
months.

It captured the attention of broadcast legend Edward R. Murrow, who told
then-President John Kennedy about it.

Kennedy said of OSCAR: "This is exactly what we're looking for.. a peaceful
use of space."

In a Dec. 12, 1986, article in The Times, Esneault said Kennedy was
responsible for giving OSCAR the go-ahead to ride aboard a military mission.

Esneault became an avid ham radio operator and received his license at age 13. 
While in high school, he took night lessons to learn Morse code so he could 
be certified by the Federal Communications Commission. His instructor was so 
impressed with his aptitude, he offered the teenager a job with Pan American 
World Airways.

Another case of "We are History, We are Ham Operators".

[ANS thanks John, VK5BUI, for the above information]

/EX


SB SAT @ AMSAT $ANS-077.04
Call for donations for ARISS Antennas on Columbus

AMSAT News Service Bulletin 077.04
 From AMSAT HQ SILVER SPRING, MD.
March 18, 2007
To All RADIO AMATEURS
BID: $ANS-077.04

This week Gaston Bertels, ON4WF, ARISS-Europe chairman discussed the
planned amateur radio station to be installed aboard the European Space
Agency's Columbus Space Laboratory module which will be added to the
International Space Station.

The microwave panel antenanas, attached to the Meteorite Debris Panels
of the Columbus Space Laboratory, will allow operationgs on new frequen-
cies that will enable ARISS to establish wideband and video operations
for the first time. This facility will provide ATV facilities for School
contacts and allow continuous transponder operation. Also, With the
Columbus module being located at some considerable distance from the other
two ARISS stations aboard the ISS, this new antenna configuration will
permit parallel operations on the new bands at the same time as the
existing operations.

The development of the antennas is presently taken care of by the Institute
of Telecommunications and Acoustics of the Wroclaw University of Technology.
The Columbus antennas will work on L-band and S-band.

Taking into account that time is getting really short, ARISS-Europe renews
the call for donations to the IARU and AMSAT societies as well as to their
members individually.

A financial account has been opened by AMSAT Belgium. Donators within the
European Union will not have to pay any additional banking costs (beyond
the costs of a national money transfer) if they use the following inter-
national banking number (IBAN) and mention the international identification
code (BIC), reference the transfer as "Donation Columbus":

AMSAT Belgium
001-2306592-08

IBAN BE63 0012 3065 9208
BIC GEBABEBB

If you have a PayPal account you can easily make a donation by using the
"Donate" button in the left column. Even if you don't have a PayPal account
you can use your creditcard to make a Paypal donation for the Columbus pro-
ject by clicking the "Donate" button and follow instructions.

[ANS thanks Gaston, ON4WF, for the above information]

/EX


SB SAT @ AMSAT $ANS-077.05
Call for Papers--2007 ARRL/TAPR DigitalCommunications Conference

AMSAT News Service Bulletin 077.05
 From AMSAT HQ SILVER SPRING, MD.
March 18, 2007
To All RADIO AMATEURS
BID: $ANS-077.05

Technical papers are solicited for presentation at the 26th Annual ARRL
and TAPR Digital Communications Conference to be held September 28-30,
2007 in Hartford, Connecticut. These papers will also be published in
the Conference Proceedings (you do NOT need to attend the conference to
have your paper included in the Proceedings). The submission deadline is
July 31, 2007. Please send papers to:

Maty Weinberg
ARRL
225 Main St
Newington, CT 06111

or you can make your submission via e-mail to: maty@arrl.org

Papers will be published exactly as submitted and authors will retain
all rights.

[ANS thanks Steve, WB8IMY, for the above information]

/EX


SB SAT @ AMSAT $ANS-077.06
ARISS Status - 12 March 2007

AMSAT News Service Bulletin 077.06
 From AMSAT HQ SILVER SPRING, MD.
March 18, 2007
To All RADIO AMATEURS
BID: $ANS-077.06

1. Illinois School Contact Successful

On Tuesday, March 6, students at Boulder Hill Elementary School in Montgomery, 
Illinois participated in an Amateur Radio on International Space Station 
(ARISS) contact. Twenty-three children from the Boulder Hill Radio Club were 
able to ask one question each of Sunita Williams, KD5PLB. The audio was fed 
into the EchoLink AMSAT (101 377) and JK1ZRW (277 208) servers (15 
connections from six countries), as well as the IRLP Discovery Reflector 
9010. Several newspapers covered the event. The Beacon News posted an article
on its website. See:
http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/beaconnews/news/286091,2_1_AU07_RADIO_S1.a
rticle

Several local dignitaries attended including the mayor of Oswego who
remarked, ¡ÈA very impressive presentation. I ran a Summer Science Camp in
Naperville 203 Schools for 17 years until I retired last year and wish we
could have had this experience for our science campers since our focus was on
space travel and students built rockets and robots. Your presentation was
mentioned at this mornings's Rotary Club meeting and we who were present
applauded your efforts, your clubs hard work, and the students'/teachers
tremendous interest.¡É

The School Superintendent also sent thanks ¡Èfor bringing a very special,
history making event to the kids and the community. I am certain our kids
will never forget yesterday. I know I won¡Çt.¡É

Another thank you from the ARISS-Boulder Hill contact control operator was
posted to the ISS Fan Club webpage. See:
http://www.issfanclub.com/node/5743#comment-11410


2. Mission Viejo School Contact Successful

On Friday, March 9, Mike Lopez-Alegria, KE5GTK, spoke with 9-12th  graders
from Mission Viejo High School in California, (Mike¡Çs alma mater), during an
Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact. Originally
planned for March 8, the school experienced technical difficulties, and the
contact was rescheduled for the next day. The astronaut answered 13 questions
posed to him by thirteen students. The audio was streamed live on the
University of California, Irvine website. Audio was also fed into the
Echolink AMSAT server, which received 9 connections, including 2 repeaters,
from the U.S., Japan, the Netherlands and Australia.  The Orange County
Register ran an article on its website covering the event entitled, ¡ÈStudents
pick brain of O.C. astronaut.¡É See:
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/sciencetech/abox/article_1614937.php

3. ARISS Contact Excites School Children

Nathan McCray, K9CPO, who teaches at East Elementary School in Wisconsin, left 
his ham radio turned on in the classroom in case any contacts with the Space 
Station might be heard. He was fortunate enough to pick up on an Amateur 
Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) school contact which grabbed 
his students¡Ç attention for the next several minutes. One of the students 
participating in the contact asked how fast the space station traveled and 
when Sunita gave the answer ¡Èover 17,000 mph,¡É the class made a 
collective ¡ÈOoooh¡É sound! Afterwards, the teacher took the opportunity to
teach a mini-lesson on geography and math using the information presented in
that short ARISS contact. The students have repeatedly asked him, ¡ÈWhen can
we talk to the astronauts?¡É He is now in the process of filling out an
application.

4. Virginia Run Elementary School Contact Update

Virginia Run Elementary School experienced an Amateur Radio on the
International Space Station (ARISS) contact on March 2. The American Radio
Relay League covered the event with a story posted on its website. See:
http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2007/03/06/101/?nc=1
Photos of the contact are available on:
http://www.viennawireless.org/ariss.php

[ANS thanks Carol, KB3LKI for the above information]

/EX


In addition to regular membership, AMSAT offers membership in the President's
Club. Members of the President's Club, as sustaining donors to AMSAT Project
Funds, will be eligible to receive additional benefits. Application forms are
available from the AMSAT Office.

73,
This week's ANS Editor,
Lee McLamb, KU4OS
ku4os at amsat dot org

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