ISS Contact

QSL from the ISS
(Originally published in the September 2002 LEARA Spirit of '76 and '88)
A few weeks after penning the previous article, "Working the International Space Station," I was able to make voice contact with Cosmonaut Valeri Korzun, RZ3FK, the ISS Expedition Five Commander from the car, using an HT, seven watts and a quarter wave mag mount on the roof. It was a warm, sunny, summer, Friday afternoon. I had just pulled into a friend’s driveway when the alarm on my watch went off. I had set it earlier that morning after running ISS orbital pass predications for the weekend and seeing that there was going to be a pass that afternoon with a max elevation of eighty (80) degrees, meaning it would pass almost directly overhead. Not only would it pass almost overhead, it would fall near the beginning of the crew’s usual sleep time which meant there would be a better chance of actually catching them on the air. I parked the car and flipped the HT over to 145.805 Mhz and started to monitor fully expecting to hear the on-board packet digipeater at the start of the pass. A minute or so later the radio started to quiet up a little bit and I though I heard a voice or voices. (When monitoring the ISS I have found it easier to open the squelch all the way and as the receiver starts to capture a signal the static gets quieter letting me know I am hearing something). A few moments later the voice was S9 and better and had a thick Russian accent and was clearly working stations and identifying as RS0ISS. I listened for a few more moments but because the nature of split frequency operation I could not tell when other stations may have been transmitting. I tried calling RS0ISS a few times but whenever I un-keyed the voice was in the middle of saying something apparently to someone else. I listened a few more moments and then tried calling RS0ISS again and repeated the suffix of my call sign three and four times phonetically, (a trick I have learned participating in many Field Day operations). I did this three or four more time over the next minute sometimes just repeating the last two letters of my call phonetically… “*RS0ISS this is Kilo Alpha Eight Victor India Tango, India Tango, India Tango, India Tango, over.” “India Tango, nice to hear you. Good Evening, RS0ISS*.” I was dumb struck! Did he just answer me? It took me a second or two to regain my composure. I tried to reply back to him but by then he had already worked two other stations. I listened to the rest of the pass, which lasted about another seven minutes. He worked all the other stations in a similar manner. Short and sweet. I could just imagine the pile-up on his end. I QSLed to ARISS hoping he had copied my call correctly and that it had made it into the log. A few weeks later I was rewarded when I received the QSL card pictured above confirming my contact!

Front of QSL card	Back of QSL card
(Click either QSL card image for a larger view or click the ISS QSL Card page link below)

ISS QSL Card Page