VA2CST - My International Space Station ISS voice contact on ham radio with Valery Korzun

This is my ham radio voice contact with Valery Korzun abord the ISS made on August 11th, 2002 at 1100UTC, one minute before LOS.

[@ve6wo]

Amazing! It would be one of those stories you can tell your grandchildren about, talking to the ISS! Very nice :-)

[@Aleziss]

Hi Gregg, thank you for the nice comment ! it's sad that they are never on the air anymore, they just do voice contacts with schools these days and the FM repeater is a mess here, everybody talk ontop of each others... I also did a nice contact with MIR space station with the actual QSL paper card as confirmation, not too long before it was destroyed ! Those were pretty fun days in my ham radio journey ! 73 de Claude VA2CST

[@SpaceComms]

Great contact! I love seeing recordings/hearing recordings of random ISS contacts.

[@Aleziss]

thank you for your appreciation ! I am just about to reinstall small yagis to do some contact again on satellite. It's been almost 20 years since my last satellite contact. I made nice contact too with AO-10, 78000km back and forth, I could hear the audio delay in my downlink !!! Also was able to decode telemetry of P3D just before it died. Made numerous contact in meteor scatter and aurora propagation on 2m and 6m. Really enjoy that time. I hope to be able to setup something soon, maybe we will make contact over satellite !! 73 de Claude VA2CST

[@SpaceComms]

@@Aleziss never done anything like what you did with AO-10! We have a lot different sats now except AO-7. That one came back to life. I hope to work you soon! 73, John Brier KG4AKV

[@Aleziss]

@@SpaceComms AO-10 was my favorite sat, when it was really high, 10-20kkm, it would cover a large part of europe and the whole north america, it was a fantastic satellite to work but did require high gain antennas. Yesterday, I did my first satellite contact since 18 years on AO92 with my vertical antenna ! And I've got the priviledge of contacting N1KSC, Kennedy Space Center station !!!! I was so excited !!! Condition were aweful but I managed to do the whole exchange and they did log my call on LoTW. It did revive a LOT of interest in that communication mode... just too bad that 80% of amateur satellite are digital and so few on phone...

[@SpaceComms]

@@Aleziss Welcome back! Kevin, KK4YEL is one of the N1KSC ops and he is very active with his own call on sats. I happen to be in Orlando Florida now for a workshop this weekend and tomorrow I'm going to KSC visitor's center for a NASA TV live broadcast celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo. As far as 80 precent of ops on digital instead of phone, do you mean FM instead of linear/SSB? Because I would say APRS sats are no where near as popular as FM/SSB sats, though FM is way more popular than SSB.

[@Aleziss]

@@SpaceComms well I meant most of satellites modes are something like 1200bps AFSK, 200kbps MSK, 9600bps FSK, 19k2 GMSK and so on... which, I think, are digital modes... very few are on SSB transponders (the one I prefer) or FM phone compared to the other digital modes... or am I mistaken... www.ne.jp/asahi/hamradio/je9pel/satslist.htm see a bit below his page, you'll see all active satellites and their modes... site seems up to date. By the way, do you think that using simple V/U yagis as LEO satellite antenna is ok or it is still preferable to use circular polarized antennas ? I was about to install two V/U yagis but I have a doubt now...

[@jessicapierre1539]

Really nice Claude. Pierre

[@Aleziss]

thanks for your nice comment ! I hope to be able to make such contact again one day !