APRS packet traveled 104.7 miles

[K7XRL]

Could you put one at your house and fill in the gap below?

Possibly. There is a local ham club meeting in a couple of weeks and I could ask them about it. It might not be necessary, but a few trips around my little town and monitoring travelers up the highway seem to indicate the coverage isn't complete out on my side of the valley. The club website indicates there are 3 digis maintained by the club. The closest one is 27 miles to a mountain in the center of the valley, and the other 2 are on the west side at 35 and 49 miles. There are none on the east side of the valley. It seems like I can only get into them with a "good" antenna.

I am still learning about this so there is the possibility I am just overlooking something.

 

[K7XRL]

You don't really need a yagi for the ISS. I easily hit it with a 2m 1/4 wave While mobile. Any other vertical won't do as well. It's a radiation angle issue. 5 watts at a time and day when most people are doing something else is all you need.

I have one of the popular DIY 1/4 wave ground planes built with brass brazing rods on a SO239. Maybe I'll give it a try, but I thought the ground planes were designed to radiate most of their energy out parallel to the ground. If the ISS passed directly overhead it would be in a null, wouldn't it? Closer to the horizon looks like it might be worth a shot.

 

[Jay911]

I've worked the ISS on APRS with a Larsen 2/70 magmount, just my regular old ham antenna.

 

[w9xxx]

That's the secret. The horizon is the prime catch unless you're into trying to tune off freq to compensate for the doppler effect. you have about 90 seconds on each end of a 6 minute period for a directly overhead pass. If the pass isn't directly overhead you have a little more until the angle gets extreme. I just keep the downlink freq in my scan bank and if I start hearing it squawking I tune my D700 to it and start throwing packets until I cant hear it. then about 3 minutes later I get another chance. My base antenna for it is a 1/4 wave mounted on a hubcap just sitting on my roof with a brick holding it down. It worked better than anything else I tried. Its fun to play with.

 

[K7XRL]

That's the secret. The horizon is the prime catch unless you're into trying to tune off freq to compensate for the doppler effect. you have about 90 seconds on each end of a 6 minute period for a directly overhead pass. If the pass isn't directly overhead you have a little more until the angle gets extreme. I just keep the downlink freq in my scan bank and if I start hearing it squawking I tune my D700 to it and start throwing packets until I cant hear it. then about 3 minutes later I get another chance. My base antenna for it is a 1/4 wave mounted on a hubcap just sitting on my roof with a brick holding it down. It worked better than anything else I tried. Its fun to play with.

Thanks for the pointers. I suppose giving it a try with my existing equipment might be worth a shot to see if I can make it.

So an existing APRS station should be able to pick up packets from the ISS as long as it is tuned to the correct frequency? In other words, I don't need to change any other settings?

 

[jparks29]

I've had a few good ones....

Mountain tops work great, lemme tell ya....

I run a Maxrad 1/2 wave for VHF....

 

[kayn1n32008]

Wanna kill APRS for a day or two? Toss a balloon with WIDE7 enabled.

Lol, Wide 2-2 on a balloon is bad enough...


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[kd7mxi]

i hit los angelas i think it was from up on a mountain above pahrump nevada ... in 1 to 4 bounces ... data on aprs said signal went well over 200 miles , with a handheld hooked to a ant on the truck

 

[w9xxx]

yes. just change tx and rx freq and edit your path to include rs0iss. should work fine.

 

[w9xxx]

Oh, and dont be disapointed when its not working and you're sure it should be. There's a couple hundred other guys you cant here throwing packets at the same time and they all have $10,000 antenna farms. Good luck.

 

[K7XRL]

Oh, and dont be disapointed when its not working and you're sure it should be. There's a couple hundred other guys you cant here throwing packets at the same time and they all have $10,000 antenna farms. Good luck.

Lol, I am sure you're right about that!

Though I could probably copy some online plans for a ridiculously long scratch build Yagi and just go outside and point right at it and use my 857D, but that would defeat the idea of working it with a handheld.

I have been reading about Doppler shift and have a couple of different satellite tracking apps I have been fooling with. The "ISS Detector" app seems like a good, full featured one. It allows you to set up alarms and shows aos and los times along with elevation angle tracking. There is one called "Heavens Above" that uses augmented reality to overlay the sat positions on a view of the sky through the phone camera.

I have not yet had any success with any of the passes I attempted so far.

I also tried listening to so-50 today but heard nothing.

I just tried the most recent pass and did not detect any packets from the station. Though I just read that they planned an EVA for the 25th and will have the radios turned off for astronaut safety. They also have one planned for the first of March. I wonder if they will turn the radios back on in the interval?

 

[K7XRL]

Well, still no luck reaching any satellites. I decided to build a Yagi so maybe this weekend I can work one.

 

[vagrant]

Well, still no luck reaching any satellites. I decided to build a Yagi so maybe this weekend I can work one.

I have successfully contacted other operators via SO-50 using a $40 Baofeng with the stock antenna. Please note that the satellite was reasonably overhead at the time.

R0ISS has never been a problem either with APRS and my Kenwood D72 with 5 watts. Please note that the ISS was reasonably overhead at the time.

When the satellite in the sky is not reasonably overhead, I use an Elk antenna. A few days ago the ISS was sending SSTV images using mode PD180. I was able to capture a few with and without using the Elk.

I am puzzled about your difficulties to at least hear other operators and wonder if it is a frequency issue.

 

[K7XRL]

I tried 145.825 for ISS. My Baofeng tunes in 2.5 kHz steps. I tried one step in either direction and did not hear any packets, but it was at 37 degrees elevation and I was using a slim Jim for that pass. I have not attempted any using the Yagi yet. I did have squelch turned off for the pass.