A good place to start, and to keep current is the AMSAT-NA (the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation) home page. They publish the AMSAT Bulletin and also archive and keep a reasonably current copies of SpaceNews which is editted by John A. Magliacane, KD2BD. The ARRL also keeps a listing of Amateur Radio Satellite Frequencies.
Information on SAREX can be found at http://Spacelink.msfc.nasa.gov and is mentioned in a collection of USENET postings. Therein, NASA has a number of other interesting pointers. And from AMSAT, an explanation of how the SAREX packet QSO robot works, so you can get your QSL card (and not disrupt others trying to do the same thing). ftp://garc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/sts.tle has current STS Keps when the Shuttle is flying. Note that joint Shuttle/MIR missions will typically use different frequencies than customarily used on SAREX missions to avoid conflicts those used by MIR, which also talks to amateurs. On STS 79: FM Voice Downlink: 145.84 MHz, FM Voice Uplink: 144.45, 144.47 MHz; Call signs N5QWL, KC5TIE, KC5TZQ.
The Naval Post Graduate School has 'Web Satellite Ground Station'. Of course, for understandable reasons (Part 97), this does not include uploading, but you can at least see what's going on in space.
Other local projects for those interested in satellites include the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics, which has a number of interesting web pages and the Space Sciences Lab at Berkeley, where Manfred Bester, author of SatTrack keeps an automatically updated web page listing the appearences of selected spacecraft above 36 major cities in the U.S.
If you want to do your own satellite calculations, here is the NORAD Two-Line Orbital Element Set Format ('KEPS'). Also from USENET, satellites can you hear with a 2m/440 hand-held, and a discussion of how much power and what kind of antenna is needed to access a LEO (low earth orbit) amateur satellite. Eventually, the former will become dated, but it'll help some folks get started in the meanwhile.
Get the current status of FO-20 from Japan, an excellent description of their new amateur satellite FO-29. The latest FO-29 Schedule can be found at http://www.kt.rim.or.jp/~jr1nvu/eindex.html. I'm going to try to keep recent news on AO-27 and MIR but no promises...
Interested in SETI (searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence)? If you
have room for a steerable TVRO dish, a suitable computer (even a 386), and
a willingness to invest in a modest amount of hardware, then you can
participate.
See http://www.setileague.org/> for
more information.
Designing your own satellite antennas? Trying to decide what satellite
equipment might best suit your needs? Here are listings of satellites by
frequency, sorted by
downlink frequencies and
uplink frequencies.
Where no uplink frequency is given, that downlink is essentially a beacon,
which may or may not be operational at all times. Also, where you see FM
on the uplink and USB on the downlink, then this is a packet satellite
requiring a 1200 bps PSK receiver. If you're looking for beacons to
see what you might be able to hear, here's a listing of satellites
by beacon frequency.
(And yes, you should be able to read these with non-table browers.)
Note that not all modes or beacons are operational at this time, and
this is based on my personal modes.dat file, which may not be the most accurate or most current (corrections
are welcome).
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