We have been working with Hudson Memorial School near Nashua, NH to prepare for a possible ARISS Crew Contact. The ARISS folks work with schools and their Ham Radio helpers to prepare for these contacts. ARISS provides recommendations for ground station equipment to help ensure a good experience for the students. The ground station recommendations provide a solid set of specifications to support communications with the ISS on the 2m band. The recommendations include things such as:
A requirement to build both a primary and a backup ground station
Radio and power specifications (a 200W amp is recommended)
Antenna specifications including recommendations to provide for switchable LHCP and RHCP
Computer controlled azimuth/elevation positioning of antennas to track the ISS
Use of a receive preamplifier at the antenna
You can read more about our ISS Contact upgrade plans via the link below…
With the construction of our portable satellite station 3.0 complete, we’ve been looking forward to an opportunity to test the new setup. We chose the Nashua Area Radio Society’s recent…
Our next generation portable satellite station is complete and we tested it during our recent Tech License Class. We discovered a minor issue which was easily sorted out. The new antenna system includes switchable circular polarity and has performed really performs well during the first 50 or so contacts made using the 3.0 station. You can read more about the new station and the initial tests via the link above.
The March Tech Night (March 13, 2018) will have an introduction to antenna modeling by me, Scott, NE1RD. I’ll begin by going through some antenna theory and then proceed on to the NEC-2 software and its popular front ends EZNEC and CocoaNEC. (Both the evaluation/demo version of EZNEC, and the Macintosh-based CocoaNEC are free.) LINUX users should consider getting Andy (KB1OIQ) Stewart’s Andy’s Ham Radio Linux suite. The main concepts you’ll learn will apply equally well to any of these programs.
Please download the antenna modeling software for your platform, and download the slides for this presentation from the Tech Night web page. The slides have a lot of detail on them, and it will be much easier to see the subtleties on your own screen.
So, bring your laptop with software and slides, and we’ll have you modeling antennas by the end of the evening. See you there!
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