Lost in space ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio

There is a fascination with space that arguably started long before the first time that human spaceflight was proposed by Scottish astronomer William Leitch in 1861. Names like Sputnik, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Columbia speak to millions of people and organisations like NASA, SpaceX and Blue Origin, to name a few, continue to feed that obsession.

In amateur radio we have our own names, things like ARISS, or Amateur Radio on the International Space Station, or its predecessor SAREX, the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment.

Today, stories about people making contact with the International Space Station continue to make news. We have school programs where amateur radio ground stations schedule a call to speak with an astronaut in space and we've been launching our own amateur satellites for a long time. Launched on the 12th of December 1961, OSCAR1, or Orbiting Satellites Carrying Amateur Radio was built by a group of California based amateur radio operators for 63 dollars. It operated for nearly 20 days, transmitting "Hi" in Morse on 144.983 MHz.

The first amateur radio space voice contact was made on the 1st of December 1983, almost forty years ago.

It's surprising that in the age of technology such a significant event has been so poorly recorded for posterity.

If you go searching for the actual audio, you'll discover several versions of this contact including varying transcripts. I've attempted to reconstruct the wording, but I've yet to hear a complete and unedited version. For example, there's an ARRL movie called "Amateur Radio's Newest Frontier" with out of sync audio. There's also an audio file with a transcript from an archived copy of a website by W7APD. The most recent one is on a video called "HAM - Official Documentary 2022", produced by students from the School of Visual and Media Arts program at the University of Montana and broadcast on Montana PBS on November 24th, 2022.

So, what follows is not necessarily complete, but calling from Space Shuttle Columbia it went a little like this:

"..U.S. west coast and calling CQ. Calling CQ North America. This is W5LFL in Columbia. In another 30 seconds I'll be standing by. Our spacecraft is in a rotation at the moment and we're just now getting the antenna pointed down somewhat more toward the Earth. So I should be able to pick up your signals a little bit better in the next few minutes. So W5LFL in Columbia is calling CQ and standing by. Go ahead."

"This is W5LFL in Colombia, W5LFL in Columbia, orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 135 Nautical Miles. Passing over the US West Coast and calling CQ. So W5LFL in Columbia is calling CQ and, ah, standing by. Go ahead."

"W5LFL on STS-9, WA1JXN, WA1 Japan X-Ray Norway, WA1JXN, Frenchtown Montana, WA1JXN standing by."

"Hello W1JXN, WA1 Juliet X-Ray November, this is W5LFL, I picked up your signals fairly weakly. I think our attitude is not really the best as yet, but you're our first contact from orbit. WA1 Juliet X-Ray November. How do you read? Over."

On board STS-9, Space Shuttle Columbia, was Dr Owen Garriott, W5LFL, now silent key. On the ground was Lance Collister, then WA1JXN, now W7GJ.

NASA published an Educational Brief for the Classroom that described Owen's set-up as a battery powered 5 Watt FM transceiver feeding a split-ring on a printed circuit board antenna that will be placed in the upper crew compartment window on the aft flight deck. Others reported that the radio was a Motorola handheld. Logging was done with a tape recorder velcroed to the transceiver.

Owen describes the antenna as a "well-designed, hand-held antenna, known as a 'cavity antenna', which could be velcroed to the window. It was about 24 inches in diameter and looked somewhat like a large aluminum (sic) cake pan"

There's an edited version of a similarly titled ARRL video called "Amateur Radio's Newest Frontier - ARRL documentary featuring Owen Garriot, W5LFL, on STS-9" showing the antenna as a copper tube, bent into a circle, mounted inside an open aluminium box that was hinged on the window to face outwards.

The NASA brief also described a range of frequencies and designated 145.55 MHz as the primary frequency over the United States. It included a whole section about synchronising clocks using WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado, odd and even minute transmission schedules and descriptions on how this should work.

Operating during time off, when the antenna was facing Earth, and being on air for about four hours during the mission, around 300 contacts were made across the globe.

Today we continue to experiment in space. The callsign N1SS is heard on-air regularly from the International Space Station, astronauts are often licensed radio amateurs, there's a permanent repeater on the ISS, we launch research spacecraft called nano-satellites or more popularly CubeSats for amateur radio at every opportunity. So far there's over 160 satellites and the adventure continues.

Speaking of experiments, albeit earthbound, the other day, my WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter beacon, using 10 milliwatts was heard 13,455 km away in Sweden, that's 1.3 Million kilometres per Watt.

What have you been up to in Amateur Radio lately?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB