Owen Garriott W5LFL Memorial SSTV Images

Below are some images that were copied by the W2MMD Clubhouse satellite station from the W5LFL memorial SSTV project. Some were copied live from the satellite while others were recorded by the clubhouse station and the audio was uploaded to SatNOGS. I downloaded the SatNOGS audio and decoded it locally. 

This was an especially interesting session for me since I was involved in the first QSO with W5LFL's space shuttle mission. At that time no hams had ever had QSOs with any human who was in space, and a group over at the Franklin Institute gathered to try for a QSO led by Chief Astronomer Derek Pitts, KA3NQN (you probably know of him but didn't know that he was a ham) . Somehow I got enlisted to join them and we set up a station somewhere on the first floor. There was a lot of interest from the local TV stations and others, and Derek turned it into a great PR event for the Institute. We were unsuccessful for the first few tries, and one night I was unable to join them but was listening on my home station when I finally heard W5LFL come back to them. It was a short QSO but tremendously satisfying for that group.

Nowadays QSOs with the ISS are more common, particularly between astronauts and schools, but this QSO preceded the ISS. Owen was the first ham astronaut to have a QSO from space. It's great to be remembering him this way.








Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 13, 2019 at 12:12 PM

    My son KA9SXP and myself N0WAF are trying the GOES project. I got my raspberry pi this week and have it set up, waiting on your suggested antenna, next week. We are doing NOAA satellites now. I'm a new pi user so any further hints on commands would be helpful, I have a pi 4. File transfers from pi to pc info please. Thanks de N0WAF

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How We Built the GOES Reception Project

Image
How We Built the GOES Reception Project Updated 12/1/18 Building our functional GOES 16 receiver was a process of broad web research and cobbling together the experiences of many other successful experimenters. We found lots of individual articles on antenna selection, software, and many other topics, but nothing that really pulled everything together. Hopefully this article will provide a comprehensive overview of our project. If you've found other tips that were useful or have questions or comments about the project, please leave them in the Comments box below and we'll try to reply when possible.  Thanks to the many experimenters whose work we copied and implemented in making this project work. Location (QTH) Our station is located at the "clubhouse" of the Gloucester County Amateur Radio Club, located in Mullica Hill New Jersey. The clubhouse provides a dedicated location for radio experimentation and radio operations, complete with a 100 foot tower for VHF...
Read more

GOES Satellite Reception Project

Image
We're getting interested in listening to the GOES geosync weather satellites, so this page is a collection of links to help get started with that project. We'll report on progress as it happens. https://www.rtl-sdr.com/setting-up-a-goes-weather-satellite-antenna-system/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/receiving-goes-weather-satellite-hrit-with-an-sdrplay-and-2-4-ghz-wifi-grid-antenna/ Detailed article: https://www.teske.net.br/lucas/2016/10/goes-satellite-hunt-part-1-antenna-system/ Good building options: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/building-a-low-cost-goes-weather-satellite-receiver-with-an-rtl-sdr/ Here's the link to an antenna:  https://www.amazon.com/1850-1990-Parabolic-Antenna-Die-Cast-15dBi/dp/B06ZYJ3P82/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1536255463&sr=8-2&keywords=parabolic+grid+antenna+1.9 Link to antenna pointing from W2MMD: https://www.satellite-calculations.com/Satellite/Catalog/catalogID.php?41866 Info on GOES 16, the east-coast satellite: https://en.wik...
Read more

Building the Raspberry Pi NOAA Satellite Station

Image
Building the Raspberry Pi NOAA Satellite Station After building the station to receive the GOES geostationary weather satellite, constructing the NOAA satellite station was a relative breeze. The NOAA series of satellites (NOAA 15, 18 and 19) are much more similar to amateur satellites than the GOES satellite – they operate in the 137 mhz band, are in low-earth orbits and transmit analog images rather than the complex error-corrected digital images of the GOES satellites. I simply followed the “ Instructables ” project design and it mostly worked the first time. The overall concept is simple – the project uses a inexpensive RTL-SDR radio and a Raspberry P i computer along with free software that you install on the Pi. There are several components to the software – first it uses the Gpredict program to set up times (cron jobs) for each satellite based on the next pass for each of the three satellites. At the scheduled time the Pi runs a script that will enable the RTL-SDR receiv...
Read more